the cold in the cooler will get hotter as a ruler

An excellent paper on areas of small system thermodynamics that I hadn’t come across before.  Beautifully written, with oodles of intuition as well as the technicalities.

Equalities and Inequalities : Irreversibility and the Second Law of Thermodynamics at the Nanoscale

... the fluctuation theorem ultimately traces back to the idea that trajectories come in pairs related by time-reversal, and that the production of entropy is intimately linked with the probability of observing one trajectory relative to the other ...

[via John Baez’ Azimuth blog]

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