[Editors] [Call for Papers] [Keywords] [Submission Instructions] [Planned Papers] [Published Papers]

Deadline for paper submission: 31 August 2008

Dr. Joe Rosen
338 New Mark Esplanade, Rockville MD 20850-2734, USA
Phone & fax: +1-301-610-7666
E-mail: joerosen@mailaps.org
Keywords: symmetry, Curie principle, space, time, spacetime, quantum

Papers should be submitted by e-mail to entropy@mdpi.org (add "Manuscript for Entropy Topical Issue on Symmetry and Entropy" as the message title and send a copy to Dr. Joe Rosen,joerosen@mailaps.org). Both full research papers and review articles are invited. For planned articles, a title and short abstract (100 words) can be sent to the Editor for announcment on this website.

The relation between symmetry and entropy is a deep one. For isolated systems that are meaningfully describable in terms of microstates and macrostates, entropy S obeys the second law of thermodynamics and never decreases as the system evolves. A macrostate of such a system possesses a natural symmetry, its invariance under permutations of the set of microstates corresponding to it. Macroevolution is generally convergent, with the same final macrostate resulting from (usually many) different initial macrostates. But microevolution is nonconvergent, where different microstates always evolve into different microstates. (Nonconvergence is related to time reversal symmetry.) With the degree of symmetry of a macrostate represented by the number of its corresponding microstates W (monotonically related to the order of the symmetry group W!), it follows from the Curie principle (or symmetry principle) that the degree of symmetry of a macrostate never decreases as the system evolves. This is the special symmetry evolution principle and it is isomorphic with the second law under interchange of S and W. These two quantities are indeed monotonically increasing functions of each other through the famous relation S = k log W. This special issue celebrates that relation.

Joe Rosen
20 February 2008

Curie-Rosen symmetry principle (or Curie symmetry principle, or symmetry principle), causality, symmetry evolution, continuous symmetry, similarity, indistinguishanbility, chirality, asymmetry

 
To be added

Joe Rosen^*
338 New Mark Esplanade,Rockville MD 20850, USA; Email: joerosen@mailaps.org
^* Visiting professor, The Catholic University of America, Washington DC. Retired from Tel Aviv University.
Comment: The Symmetry Principle
Entropy 2005, 7(4), 308-313 (Full text in PDF form, 47 K)


Joel Ratsaby
Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, Ariel University Center of Samaria, Ariel 40700, Israel; E-mail: ratsaby@ariel.ac.il; http://www.ariel.ac.il/ee/pf/ratsaby/
Received: 28 February 2008; in revised form: 16 March 2008 / Accepted: 19 March 2008 / Published: 20 March 2008
Full Paper: An Algorithmic Complexity Interpretation of Lin’s Third Law of Information Theory
Entropy 2008, 10, 6-14 (PDF format 182 K)
DOI: 10.3390/entropy-e10010006