Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Thursday - Week 8, MT23)
Thursday 30 November, 3pm
Lecture Room, Radcliffe Humanities
Bryan Roberts (LSE): 'How black holes are really hot'
When is a system "really" thermal? Such philosophical questions are not so easy given the many varieties of black hole radiation, acoustic horizon radiation, and other oddities of modern physics. In this talk, I try to add some clarity by defending one precise definition of what it means to be "thermal" in the sense of a model of thermodynamics, which adopts a framework inspired by Gibbs and now known as Geometric Thermodynamics. In this framework, it is possible to give one clear sense in which black holes really are hot, although their thermodynamic properties are radically different than the usual earthly models of thermodynamics like a box of gas in equilibrium.
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