Abstract
We point out that an early work of J. Willard Gibbs (1875) contains a correct analysis of the “Gibbs Paradox” about entropy of mixing, free of any elements of mystery and directly connected to experimental facts. However, it appears that this has been lost for 100 years, due to some obscurities in Gibbs’ style of writing and his failure to include this explanation in his later Statistical Mechanics. This “new” understanding is not only of historical and pedagogical interest; it gives both classical and quantum statistical mechanics a different status than that presented in our textbooks, with implications for current research.
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Jaynes, E.T. (1992). The Gibbs Paradox. In: Smith, C.R., Erickson, G.J., Neudorfer, P.O. (eds) Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods. Fundamental Theories of Physics, vol 50. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2219-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2219-3_1
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