In physics, Loschmidt's paradox (named for Josef Loschmidt), also known as the reversibility paradox, irreversibility paradox, or Umkehreinwand (from German 'reversal objection'), is the objection that it should not be possible to deduce an irreversible process from time-symmetric dynamics. This puts the time reversal symmetry of (almost) all known low-level fundamental physical processes at odds with any attempt to infer from them the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the behaviour of macroscopic systems. Both of these are well-accepted principles in physics, with sound observational and theoretical support, yet they seem to be in conflict, hence the paradox.
Origin Josef Loschmidt's criticism was provoked by the H-theorem of Boltzmann, which employed kinetic theory to explain the increase of entropy in an ideal gas from a non-equilibrium state, when the molecules of the gas are allowed to collide. In 1876, Loschmidt pointed out that if there is a motion of a system from time t0 to time t1 to time t2 that leads to a steady decrease of H (increase of entropy) with time, then there is another allowed state of motion of the system at t1, found by reversing all the velocities, in which H must increase. This revealed that one of Boltzmann's key assumptions, molecular chaos, or, the Stosszahlansatz, that all particle velocities were completely uncorrelated, did not follow from Newtonian dynamics. Reversible laws of motion cannot explain why we experience our world to be in such a comparatively low state of entropy at the moment (compared to the equilibrium entropy of universal heat death); and to have been at even lower entropy in the past. Later authors coined the term "Loschmitz's demon" (in analogy to Maxwell's demon, see below) for an entity that is able to reverse time evolution in a microscopic system, in their case of nuclear spins, which is indeed, if only for a short time, experimentally possible.
Before Loschmidt In 1874, two years before the Loschmidt paper, William Thomson defended the second law against the time reversal objection in his paper "The kinetic theory of the dissipation of energy".
Arrow of time
Any process that happens regularly in the forward direction of time but rarely or never in the opposite direction, such as entropy increasing in an isolated system, defines what physicists call an arrow of time in nature. This term only refers to an observation of an asymmetry in time; it is not meant to suggest an explanation for such asymmetries. Loschmidt's paradox is equivalent to the question of how it is possible that there could be a thermodynamic arrow of time given time-symmetric fundamental laws, since time-symmetry implies that for any process compatible with these fundamental laws, a reversed version that looked exactly like a film of the first process played backwards would be equally compatible with the same fundamental laws, and would even be equally probable if one were to pick the system's initial state randomly from the phase space of all possible states for that system. Although most of the arrows of time described by physicists are thought to be special cases of the thermodynamic arrow, there are a few that are believed to be unconnected, like the cosmological arrow of time based on the fact that the universe is expanding rather than contracting, and the fact that a few processes in particle physics actually violate T-symmetry, while they respect a related symmetry known as CPT symmetry. In the case of the cosmological arrow, most physicists believe that entropy would continue to increase even if the universe began to contract (although the physicist Thomas Gold once proposed a model in which the thermodynamic arrow would reverse in this phase). In the case of the violations of time-symmetry in particle physics, the situations in which they occur are rare and are only known to involve a few types of meson particles. Furthermore, due to CPT symmetry, reversal of the direction of time is equivalent to renaming particles as antiparticles and vice versa. Therefore, this cannot explain Loschmidt's paradox.
Dynamical systems
Current research in dynamical systems offers one possible mechanism for obtaining irreversibility from reversible systems. The central argument is based on the claim that the correct way to study the dynamics of macroscopic systems is to study the transfer operator corresponding to the microscopic equations of motion. It is then argued that the transfer operator is not unitary (i.e. is not reversible) but has eigenvalues whose magnitude is strictly less than one; these eigenvalues corresponding to decaying physical states. This approach is fraught with various difficulties; it works well for only a handful of exactly solvable models. Abstract mathematical tools used in the study of dissipative systems include definitions of mixing, wandering sets, and ergodic theory in general.
Fluctuation theorem
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