Meir Hemmo and Orly Shenker, “The Road to Maxwell’s Demon: Conceptual Foundations of Statistical Mechanics” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
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What puzzling question about time‑asymmetry in thermodynamics does the book address?
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Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor of the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese of Vanderbilt. In our bi-monthly podcasts, we interview philosophers about their new books across a wide variety of philosophical topics and areas. Today's interview is with Meir Hemo of the University of Haifa and Orly Schenker of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem about their new book, The Road to Maxwell's Demon, Conceptual Foundations of Statistical Mechanics, just out from Cambridge University Press. Among the very many puzzling aspects of the physical world is this. How do we explain the fact that the laws of thermodynamics are time asymmetric, while those of statistical mechanics are time symmetric?
If the fundamental physical laws do not require events to occur in any particular temporal direction, Then why do we observe a world in which, for example, we will always see milk dispersing in tea, but never coming together in tea? At least not unless we film the dispersal and then run the film backwards. In their new book, Hemmo and Schenker provide a fascinating and accessible defense of the position that the laws of thermodynamics are observer-relative, that the evolutions of physical microstates in classical mechanics have a direction of time but no determinate direction, and that the relation between observers and the dynamics determines the direction of time that we observe and capture in our thermodynamical laws.
In consequence, they argue, it's just a contingent fact that we remember the past rather than the future, and Maxwellian demons, perpetual motion machines that can exploit more and more energy while putting in less and less work, are possible. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Meir and Orly. Hi. Hi. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy. Thank you.
It's good to have this interview.
Yeah, so I found your book, The Road to Maxwell's Demon, just really fascinating and also very accessible because I'm not a philosopher of physics. So it was surprisingly gratifying to be able to read through the book and see the dynamical equations and so forth, but actually understand what was going on. So that was very important to me. So the book as a whole is propelled by a fundamental problem, which is how we explain the fact that the laws of thermodynamics are time asymmetric, while those of statistical mechanics are time symmetric. And one of the really interesting implications you draw towards the end of the book is that it's just a contingent fact that we remember the past rather than the future.
And another one was that building a Maximilian demon or a perpetual motion machine is just a practical problem.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What puzzling question about time‑asymmetry in thermodynamics does the book address?
0:00–14:01
2
How do Hemmo and Shenker explain why thermodynamic laws are observer‑relative?
14:01–30:34
3
What is the role of observers and micro‑state dynamics in creating the arrow of time?
30:34–36:27
4
How are macrostates defined through observer‑observed correlations?
36:27–1:05:52
Speakers
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