Cargando…

Observable and Unobservable Mechanical Motion

A thermodynamic approach to mechanical motion is presented, and it is shown that dissipation of energy is the key process through which mechanical motion becomes observable. By studying charged particles moving in conservative central force fields, it is shown that the process of radiation emission...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Müller, J. Gerhard
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7517280/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33286508
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22070737
_version_ 1783587193808224256
author Müller, J. Gerhard
author_facet Müller, J. Gerhard
author_sort Müller, J. Gerhard
collection PubMed
description A thermodynamic approach to mechanical motion is presented, and it is shown that dissipation of energy is the key process through which mechanical motion becomes observable. By studying charged particles moving in conservative central force fields, it is shown that the process of radiation emission can be treated as a frictional process that withdraws mechanical energy from the moving particles and that dissipates the radiation energy in the environment. When the dissipation occurs inside natural (eye) or technical photon detectors, detection events are produced which form observational images of the underlying mechanical motion. As the individual events, in which radiation is emitted and detected, represent pieces of physical action that add onto the physical action associated with the mechanical motion itself, observation appears as a physical overhead that is burdened onto the mechanical motion. We show that such overheads are minimized by particles following Hamilton’s equations of motion. In this way, trajectories with minimum curvature are selected and dissipative processes connected with their observation are minimized. The minimum action principles which lie at the heart of Hamilton’s equations of motion thereby appear as principles of minimum energy dissipation and/or minimum information gain. Whereas these principles dominate the motion of single macroscopic particles, these principles become challenged in microscopic and intensely interacting multi-particle systems such as molecules moving inside macroscopic volumes of gas.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-7517280
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2020
publisher MDPI
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-75172802020-11-09 Observable and Unobservable Mechanical Motion Müller, J. Gerhard Entropy (Basel) Article A thermodynamic approach to mechanical motion is presented, and it is shown that dissipation of energy is the key process through which mechanical motion becomes observable. By studying charged particles moving in conservative central force fields, it is shown that the process of radiation emission can be treated as a frictional process that withdraws mechanical energy from the moving particles and that dissipates the radiation energy in the environment. When the dissipation occurs inside natural (eye) or technical photon detectors, detection events are produced which form observational images of the underlying mechanical motion. As the individual events, in which radiation is emitted and detected, represent pieces of physical action that add onto the physical action associated with the mechanical motion itself, observation appears as a physical overhead that is burdened onto the mechanical motion. We show that such overheads are minimized by particles following Hamilton’s equations of motion. In this way, trajectories with minimum curvature are selected and dissipative processes connected with their observation are minimized. The minimum action principles which lie at the heart of Hamilton’s equations of motion thereby appear as principles of minimum energy dissipation and/or minimum information gain. Whereas these principles dominate the motion of single macroscopic particles, these principles become challenged in microscopic and intensely interacting multi-particle systems such as molecules moving inside macroscopic volumes of gas. MDPI 2020-07-03 /pmc/articles/PMC7517280/ /pubmed/33286508 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22070737 Text en © 2020 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Müller, J. Gerhard
Observable and Unobservable Mechanical Motion
title Observable and Unobservable Mechanical Motion
title_full Observable and Unobservable Mechanical Motion
title_fullStr Observable and Unobservable Mechanical Motion
title_full_unstemmed Observable and Unobservable Mechanical Motion
title_short Observable and Unobservable Mechanical Motion
title_sort observable and unobservable mechanical motion
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7517280/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33286508
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22070737
work_keys_str_mv AT mullerjgerhard observableandunobservablemechanicalmotion