2nd Law for Radiative Heat Transfer as Finite Precision Physics

Transfer of heat energy from warm to cold by electromagnetic waves.

This is a continuation of recent posts on the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

There is a 2nd Law for radiative heat transfer expressing:  

• Heat energy is transferred by electromagnetic waves from a body with higher temperature to a body with lower temperature, not the other way.  (*) 

Why is that? Standard physics states that it is a consequence of Plank's law of radiation based on statistics of energy quanta, as an analog of Boltzmann's proof of a 2nd Law based on statistical mechanics. The objections raised to Boltzmann's proof carry over to that of  Planck, who was very unhappy with his proof but not as unhappy as Boltzmann with his. 

An approach without statistics is presented on Computational Blackbody Radiation where (*) appears as a high frequency cut-off increasing with temperature. The effect is that only frequencies above cut-off for the body with lower temperature have a heating effect resulting in one-way transfer of heat from warm to cold. For more details check-out this presentation. 

The high-frequency cut-off can be seen as an expression of finite precision increasing with temperature of atomic oscillation as heat energy. One-way heat transfer is thus a threshold phenomenon connected to finite precision.

Similarly, the photoelectric effect can be explained as a threshold phenomenon connected to finite precision, where only light of sufficiently high frequency can produce electrons. 

A 2nd Law based on finite precision physics thus can serve a role both in both fluid mechanics, and electromagnetics,  and also quantum mechanics as discussed in this post.  

In other words, finite precision physics in analog or digital form appears as the crucial aspect giving  meaning to a universal 2nd Law, which is missing in standard physics with infinite precision. 

The general idea is to replace statistical physics, which is not real physics, by finite precision computation, which can be both analog and digital physics. 

Of course, this idea will not be embraced by analytical mathematicians or theoretical physicists working with infinite precision...