Physics and Astronomy At The University of Georgia

Since the last quarter of the 19th century, the status of the second law of thermodynamics has been fiercely debated. Boltzmann saw the 2nd law as a consequence of the complexity of molecular motions. Loschmidt argued that irreversibility cannot be derived from a fundamentally time-reversible dynamic principle.   In this talk I will describe a special class of dynamical systems for which the "Loschmidt Echo" can be observed and what such observations tell us about irreversibility and the arrow of time