The Bayesian Second Law of Thermodynamics

Anthony Bartolotta, Sean Carroll, Stefan Leichenauer, and Jason Pollack, 2015 arxiv:1508.02421 [cond-mat.stat-mech] Abstract: We derive a generalization of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that uses Bayesian updates to explicitly incorporate the effects of a measurement of a system at some point in its evolution. By allowing an experimenter’s knowledge to be updated by the measurement process, this formulation resolves a tension between the fact that the entropy of a statistical system can...