Entropy and the second law

Name: Entropy and the second law
ISBN: 9789814374897

Arieh Ben-Naim · 2012

"This book presents a clear and readable description of one of the most mysterious concepts of physics: Entropy. It contains a self-learning kit that guides the reader in understanding the concepts of entropy. In the first part, the reader is asked to play the familiar twenty-Question game. Once the reader feels comfortable with playing this game and acquires proficiency in playing the game effectively (intelligently), he or she will be able to capture the elusive and used-to-be mysterious concept of entropy.

Physics & Cosmology

Open Library Amazon

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tedsandersNov 2016
Would you mind sharing a link to a proof of the second law using Markov chains and information theory? I'd like to learn more about this approach.
I'm surprised that Markov chains would be involved when the laws of physics are deterministic.
The Poincare recurrence theorem has always suggested to me that the second law is not as fundamental as other laws. For a finite system with finite phase space, the state of a system will traverse closed loops, repeating forever with no steady increase or decrease in entropy. (Edit: to be clear, I'm not claiming that what I just described is the Poincare recurrence theorem or that it applies to our universe. But it is worth considering systems where the second law doesn't apply and trying to figure out how and if they differ critically from reality.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_recurrence_theor...
Not that my background is worth anything, but just so you know where I'm coming from, I have a PhD in physics, spent years thinking about the entropy of computation, and wrote parts of the Wikipedia entry on Maxwell's demon. I think much of the disagreement over entropy and the second law comes from how we frame the problem.
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