Recent content by Anna57

Thank you for your reply! I suppose the illustration with the spring makes sense: by Noether we know that the potential energy of the spring cannot just disappear. It stands to reason, then, that it must have been transferred into the system in some way (it is completely unreasonable that it...

Do you happen to have any resource discussing this fact? It is easy to show for macroscopic, mechanical energies that work is equivalent to the changes in energy. How is the same thing shown for microscopic particles? As far as I know, they don't obey Newtonian mechanics. I understood this...

Hello! I have recently been reflecting on the formal structure of the second edition of Callen's Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics. Callen essentially postulates the existence of a function U, called the "internal energy", as a coordinate of thermodynamic systems. He...

Hello! I am currently reading the second edition of Callen's Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics, and I have a question regarding Callen's definition of quasi-static. On page 96, Callen says: Another way of characterizing Callen's definition is that a process is quasi-static...