Caratheodory's formulation of thermodynamics, Rejected?

[ShayanJ]

I was trying to find some papers on caratheodory's formulation of thermodynamics and This paper is one of the things I found. I want to know is there any respond to this paper till now?Should we say the formulation should be put aside?
Any other ideas are welcome too.
Thanks

 

[DrDu]

No, on the contrary, I think it is the basis for most modern formulations. Check out the book by Peter Landsberg, Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, which uses his approach.
A very good account of the different formulations of thermodynamics can be found in the book by Buchdahl:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/052104359X/?tag=pfamazon01-20
An axiomatic approach which avoids some too restrictive assumptions of Caratheodory is in the recent paper by Lieb and Yngvarson:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/9708200

 

[ShayanJ]

Yeah...I like Caratheodory's formulation too...but the paper I gave the link to in my first post is stating that Caratheodory's inaccessibility principle isn't equivalent to other forms of the second law because there is no process in nature that violates only the second law.They either satisfy first and second laws or only satisfy the first law(I don't know about this one!). The author then proves that for a state to be inaccessible from a given state by adiabatic processes,the process should violate the first law which means a process is found that violates the first law but satisfies Caratheodory's statement of the second law which is a different case compared to the other forms of the second law and so Caratheodory's principle isn't equivalent to other forms of the second law.

 

[DrDu]

I tried to find the logic behind the paper you mentioned, but I did not succeed. Apparently, it was never published in a peer reviewed journal. So as long as you can't find strong arguments as to convince me that there is any substance on that paper, I would discard it as irrelevant. Where did you dig it out, in the first place?

 

[ShayanJ]

I tried to find the logic behind the paper you mentioned, but I did not succeed. Apparently, it was never published in a peer reviewed journal. So as long as you can't find strong arguments as to convince me that there is any substance on that paper, I would discard it as irrelevant. Where did you dig it out, in the first place?

I was searching about Caratheodory's formulation and I found this on arxiv.
I'm not sure about the argument too and that's why I posted this thread. But I don't think I can simply ignore it.

 

[DrDu]

I think we are discussing a crackpot article here and the logic is far from clear.
Anyhow it is a typical task as a referee to recognize this kind of articles and refute them, so this thread is more apt for the section "Academic Guidance" than "Classical Physics".

From what I understood, the starting point of the article is the claim that a general irreversible cyclic process can be run at least in one direction (he even marks this boldface, although you it is only clear from the context that he seems to refer specifically to a cyclic process). If that is not possible, he claims this to be due to the process violating the first law.
He then argues that going from B to a and back to B is a cyclic process and is impossible in either direction according to Caratheodory. What he doesn't take into account is that Caratheodory does not talk about general irreversible changes but only adiabatic ones. Evidently such a cyclic process would be possible if we would allow for an exchange of heat.