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Budapest Reading Seminar on the Foundations of Physics

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Indistinguishability

The concept of particle indistinguishability thus construed faces some obvious challenges. It remains controversial, now for more than a century, whether classical particles can be treated as indistinguishable; or if they can, whether the puzzles raised by Gibbs are thereby solved or alleviated; and if so, how the differences between quantum and classical statistics are to be explained.
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Radiation from a Uniformly Accelerated Charge and the Equivalence Principle

It is generally accepted that any accelerated charge in Minkowski space radiates energy. It is also accepted that a stationary charge in a static gravitational field (such as a Schwarzschild field) does not radiate energy. It would seem that these two facts imply that some forms of Einstein’s Equivalence Principle do not apply to charged particles.
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Internal Absorption Properties of Accelerating Detectors

The existence of electromagnetic radiation from a uniformily accelerated charge has appeared in some recent work to present a problem suggesting the inadequacy of the equivalence principle. For a proper treatment of the problem, it is desirable to show how the absorption properties of detectors are effected by being physically attached to noninertial frames of reference. An invariant criterion of internal absorption is formulated, and is identified with the observable behavior of an elementary detector. It is shown that the propertics of a detector fixed in a uniformly accelerated frame are different from the properties of an inertial detector of similar construction, and that this difference is consistent, with the usual form of the equivalence principle.
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Unruh effect (Kiss Tamás?)


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On the Exact Identity Between Thermodynamic and Informatic Entropies in a Unitary Model of Friction (Diósi Lajos?)

We consider an elementary collision model of a molecular reservoir upon which an external field is applied and the work is dissipated into heat. To realize macroscopic irreversibility at the microscopic level, we introduce a “graceful” irreversible map which randomly mixes the identities of the molecules. This map is expected to generate informatic entropy exactly equal to the independently calculable irreversible thermodynamic entropy.
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