Is the Second Law Reversible?

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A, ok, this is a very interesting topic. Er, i see the er statements about irreversibility to do with, say, the second law and the issue of the houro of time as different or distinct. So in a way, we know that it holds for certain systems that we call microscopic a. And then we take the dynamical laws as the fundamental things, they are reversible. The second law to vondarm says, e, i think i agree with er with the kind of general view that the second law throm anamic is a law that, in the current formulations at least, holds in an ajusting approximate, in an approximate sense.

Traditional physics works within the “Laplacian paradigm”: you give me the state of the universe (or some closed system), some equations of motion, then I use those equations to evolve the system through time. Constructor theory proposes an alternative paradigm: to think of physical systems in terms of counterfactuals — the set of rules governing what can and cannot happen. Originally proposed by David Deutsch, constructor theory has been developed by today’s guest, Chiara Marletto, and others. It might shed new light on quantum gravity and fundamental physics, as well as having applications to higher-level processes of thermodynamics and biology.

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Chiara Marletto received her DPhil in physics from the University of Oxford. She is currently a research fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Her new book is The Science of Can and Can’t: A Physicist’s Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals.

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