In a new study, Hans Haubold at the Vienna National Centre, Austria, together with Constantino Tsallis at the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics, explore some of the implications of a generalised approach to thermodynamics, first developed by Tsallis in the 1980s. Today, the concepts studied by theoretical physicists encompass a variety of fields – but ultimately, they can be boiled down to just a handful of fundamental phenomena. Hans Haubold at the Vienna National Centre illustrates: ‘The pillars of contemporary theoretical physics are classical mechanics, Maxwell electromagnetism, relativity, quantum mechanics, and statistical thermodynamics’.
The first of these pillars to emerge was Newton’s classical mechanics. By drawing together centuries of observations made by astronomers and natural philosophers as they examined the world around them, Newton derived robust laws to describe the mechanical motions of massive, moving bodies. Later on, in the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell drew up a new formidable set of equations to describe the characteristics of light, and the interactions taking place between charged particles.
