I am initially physicist, experimenter in the field of soft condensed matter
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That which is neither crystalline nor liquid and undergoes physical phenomena which only become relevant at length scales much larger than that of its elementary components.
In other words, soft condensed matter displays emergent phenomena and properties (e.g. self-organization, self-similarity, phase transitions) that are highly sensitive to certain quantities that are also emergent (e.g. thermal energy, entropy).
The concept of emergence brings into play the role of the scale of observation, and therefore that of the observer and of their knowledge. Here, physics meets epistemology, the theory of knowledge. The link is made through thermodynamics and information theory. This is the topic of my most recent papers.
Recent posts
The second law of thermodynamics, which deals with irreversibility and makes the theory so special, is usually considered empirical. The definition of equilibrium as an attractor, on the other hand, requires a postulate. This article shows that both are actually already contained, even if hidden, in the fundamental principles of neopositivism, which are widely accepted in all fields of science. In particular, from the definition of information as a truth that can only come from an observation but cannot be redundant, we obtain Clausius’ inequality.
The link between information and energy introduces the observer and his knowledge into the understanding of a fundamental quantity of physics. Two approaches compete to account for this link, Brillouin’s negentropy law of information and Landauer’s law on data erasure, which are often confused. The first, based on the Clausius’ inequality and Shannon’s mathematical results is very robust, while the second, based on the simple idea that information needs a material embodiment (data-bits) is today perceived as more physical and prevails.
