Entropy, Time and Evolution II

Dear Colleagues,

We, and the world around us, constantly develop and evolve. The Universe and stars as well as societies and living beings pass through sequential stages from birth to maturity and death. This is a continuous process: one is replaced with the other. The one that has appeared repeats the old in some way, while being new in the other. We, and the world around us, develop directionally and irreversibly.

From long ago, humanity has used time to describe this movement and, specifically, its directionality and duration. The greatest minds of the past were interested in this concept and studied time: St. Augustine, Newton, Kant, Bergson, Einstein, et al. However, time—one of the most complex and controversial concepts used by people—is still not fully defined and understood.

Entropy, another concept, appeared more than 150 years ago in thermodynamics and then penetrated and developed in other branches of science. This quantity is used to study the evolution of various objects by representatives of numerous sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, linguistics and economics, among others. There are a number of important statements formulated for this quantity in science. Most notably, these are the second law of thermodynamics and the principles of minimum and maximum entropy production. Entropy is considered to be a measure of irreversibility, directionality of a process, and it is similar to time in this respect. However, despite being difficult to introduce and measure for some systems, entropy is simpler than the concept of time.

The following question arise in this regard: To what extent are time and entropy related? Authors are invited submit articles seeking to answer this and related questions to this Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Leonid M. Martyushev
Guest Editor

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