doi.org
Compositional thermostatics
February 2023 • John C. Baez, Owen Lynch, Joe Moeller
We define a thermostatic system to be a convex space of states together with a concave function sending each state to its entropy, which is an extended real number. This definition applies to classical thermodynamics, classical statistical mechanics, quantum statistical mechanics, and also generalized probabilistic theories of the sort studied in quantum foundations. It also allows us to treat a heat bath as a thermostatic system on an equal footing with any other. We construct an operad whose operations are conve…