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Emergence of a Second Law of Thermodynamics in Isolated Quantum Systems

wills_forward

This paper is basically statistical mechanics with a quantum veneer. Two major issues:

1. Scale: They're simulating just 13 qubits with QuTiP and making grand claims about quantum thermodynamics. The computational complexity they're glossing over here is astronomical. Anyone who's actually worked with quantum systems knows you can't just handwave away the scaling problems.

2. Measurement Problem: Their whole argument about instantaneous vs time-averaged measurements is just repackaging the quantum measurement problem without actually solving anything. They're doing the same philosophical shell game that every "breakthrough" quantum paper does by moving around where they put the observer and pretending they've discovered something profound.

westurner

ScholarlyArticle: "Emergence of a Second Law of Thermodynamics in Isolated Quantum Systems" (2025) https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/abstract/10.1103/PRXQuan...

NewsArticle: "Even Quantum Physics Obeys the Law of Entropy" https://www.tuwien.at/en/tu-wien/news/news-articles/news/auc...

NewsArticle: "Sacred laws of entropy also work in the quantum world, suggests study" ... "90-year-old assumption about quantum entropy challenged in new study" https://interestingengineering.com/science/entropy-also-work...