Time in Thermodynamics

asymmetry in thermodynamic phenomena. “Time in thermodynamics” misleadingly suggests that thermodynamics will tell us about the fun-damental nature of time. But we don’t think that thermodynamics is a fundamental theory. It is a theory of macroscopic behavior, often called a “phenomenological science. ” And to the extent that physics can tell us about the fundamental features of the world, including such things as the nature of time, we generally think that only fundamental physics can. On its own, a science like thermodynamics won’t be able to tell us about time per se. But the theory will have much to say about everyday processes that occur in time; and in particular, the apparent asymmetry of those pro-cesses. The pressing question of time in the context of thermodynamics is about the asymmetry of things in time, not the asymmetry of time, to paraphrase Price (1996, 16). I use the title anyway, to underscore what is, to my mind, the cen-trality of thermodynamics to any discussion of the nature of time an