Monday, November 3, 2014

resource recommendations - Best introduction to the link between information and thermodynamics



I have a solid understanding of classical thermodynamics, as well as a reasonable understanding of statistical mechanics and some of the philosophical issues regarding entropy. However, I've never understood the way modern physics handles Maxwell's demon. It's all well and good to pull $k \ln 2$'s out of a hat, but I've never understood exactly what trickery is going on. I mean, I'm very comfortable both with macroscopic justifications of the 2nd law, and with microscopic justifications based off ergodicity: I assume it's possible to reach a similar level of comfort with the works of Szilard and others.


So I'm looking for text book recommendations: are there any good books out there on this topic? Ideally I'd like a book which is as rigorous as possible (or which at least cites rigorous sources). Readability would be a nice bonus :)




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classical mechanics - Moment of a force about a given axis (Torque) - Scalar or vectorial?

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