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--- theorems:liouvilles_theorem [2018/04/08 10:34]
jakobadmin [Intuitive]
+++ theorems:liouvilles_theorem [2019/03/05 15:07] (current)
129.13.36.189 [Concrete]
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 ====== Liouville's theorem ======
+//also known as Liouville equation//
 <tabbox Intuitive>
+<blockquote>It turns out that the abstract phase fluid has the same properties as a real fluid that is incompressible. An incompressible real fluid is one in which any volume-element of fluid (any sample of neighbouring ‘particles’) cannot be compressed, that is, it keeps the same volume. Likewise, for the phase fluid we may examine any small 2n-dimensional volume-element within the fluid, and watch this volume as it is ‘carried along’ by the flow. Although the shape of the volume-element may become distorted yet its total volume always remains unchanged.
+<cite>The Lazy Universe by Coopersmith</cite></blockquote>
 <blockquote>Liouville's theorem can be thought of as conservation of information in classical mechanics.
@@ Line 12: / Line 17: @@
 The size of the uncertainty is a measure of how much information you have, so Liouville's theorem says that you neither gain nor lose information, i.e. information is conserved. (Specifically, the information you have is the negative of the logarithm of the uncertainty.)
 <cite>http://qr.ae/TU1ODq</cite></blockquote>
-<blockquote>It turns out that the abstract [[basic_tools:phase_space|phase fluid]] has the same proper-
-ties as a real fluid that is incompressible. An incompressible real fluid is one in which any volume-element of fluid (any sample of neighbouring ‘particles’) cannot be compressed, that is, it keeps the same volume. Likewise, for the phase fluid we may examine any small 2n-dimensional volume-element within the fluid, and watch this volume as it is ‘carried along’ by the flow. Although the shape of the volume-element may become distorted yet its total volume always remains unchanged:<cite>The Lazy Universe by Coopersmith</cite></blockquote>
-<tabbox Concrete>
-In general, for a function $\rho(t,\vec p,\vec q)$ we have
-$$
-\frac{\mathrm d}{\mathrm dt} \rho(t, \vec p(t), \vec q(t)) =\frac{\partial \rho }{\partial t}+ \sum_{i}\left(\frac{\partial \rho}{\partial q_i}\,\dot{q_i}+\frac{\partial\rho}{\partial p_i}\,\dot p_i\right) .
-$$
-Now, if $\rho$ is constant $\frac{\partial \rho }{\partial t}= 0$, then the left-hand side is $0$ and we get:
-$$\frac{\partial \rho }{\partial t}= -\sum_{i}\left(\frac{\partial \rho}{\partial q_i}\,\dot{q_i}+\frac{\partial\rho}{\partial p_i}\,\dot p_i\right)$$
-<tabbox Abstract>
-<blockquote>The intuition for the Lagrangian principle comes specific applications of Newton's laws, especially reversible systems with constraints, like nonspherical particles rolling along complicated surfaces. Newton's formulation of Newton's laws was not the end of the story, because there was more structure in the solutions of these types of problems than that which Newton made obvious.
-One thing left unsaid by Newton is conservation of energy. Elastic processes are more fundamental than inelastic ones. But energy conservation is only part of the story. Suppose you have a bunch of masses connected by springs, and one of them is attached to a double-pendulum. You could theoretically have energy conservation in such a system by having all the energy leak out of the masses on the springs and go into the double pendulum. Perhaps every frictionless motion of the springs eventually settles all the energy into a single mode.
-Your intuition is probably rebelling, telling you "that's infinitely unlikely! How could the pendulum move around and not set the springs vibrating!" But there is nothing in Newton's laws by themselves, even with the principle of conservation of energy, that prevents this sort of concentration of energy. But the solutions do not exhibit such phenomena, and there must be a reason why.
-This intuition tells you that a perfect frictionless mechanical system is more than energy-conserving, it must conserve some notion of "motion-volume", so that if you alter the initial state by a certain amount, the final state should alter the same way. It can't concentrate all motion into one mode. This principle is the principle of conservation of phase-space volume, or the conservation of information. If all the motion got concentrated into one mode, the information about where everything was would have to get absurdly compressed into a tiny region of the phase space, the space of all possible motions.
-The conservation of information is just about as fundamental as Newton's laws of motion--- it is revealing new facts about nature which are essential for the description of statistical and quantum systems. But it is nowhere to be found in Newton's formulation, because it does not follow from Newton's laws alone, even with the principle of conservation of energy added.
-So you need to understand what type of law will give a law of conservation of information. There are two paths to go down, and both lead to the same structure, but from two different points of view, local in time and global in time.
-One path is Hamiltonian: you consider formulating the law of motion as a set of symplectic equations for the position and momentum. This formulation clearly separates between reversible and irreversible dynamics, because it only works for reversible. It also explains the fundamental mathematical structure behind reversible classical mechanics, the symplectic geometry. The volume of symplectic geometry gives the precise law of information conservation, and further, the geometrical structure of systems with multiperiodic solutions, the integrable systems, is made clear.
-But this point of view is centered on a time-slicing--- it describes things going from one instant of time to another. This is not playing very nice with relativity. So you also want to think about the solution globally, and consider the space of all solutions as the phase space. The initial position and velocities are good coordinates, and intuitive ones, because they determine the future. But if you want a global picture, you want coordinates which are symmetric between the final and initial state, since the dynamics are reversible. An explicit revesible description should treat the initial time and final time symmetrically. So you can use the initial positions and final positions, which also, generically, away from certain bad choices, determine the motion.
-For these types of coordinates on phase space, you give the dynamical law as a condition on the trajectory between the intial and final positions. The condition should not be stated as a differential equation, because such a description is unnatural for boundary conditions of this sort. But when you have an action principle, you determine the trajectory by extremizing the action between the end points, you automatically have a notion of phase space volume, which is intuitive--- the phase space volume is defined by the change in the action of extremal trajectories with respect to changes in the initial velocities. This volume is the same as for the changes of the extremal trajectories with respect to changes in the final velocities. This is a straightforward consequence of the equivalence of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulation.
-The full justification for both principles comes only with quantum mechanics. There you learn that the least action principle is a geometric optics Fermat principle for matter waves, and it is saying that the trajectories are perpendicular to constant-phase lines. But historically, the Lagrangian formulation was recognized to be more fundamental a century before Hamilton conjectured that classical mechanics was a wave mechanics, and this was many decades before Schrodinger. Still, with our modern point of view, it does not hurt to learn the quantum version of these formulations first, and it certainly provides a more solid motivation than the heuristic considerations I gave above.
-<cite>https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/15958/37286</cite></blockquote>
-<tabbox Why is it interesting?>
 <blockquote>
@@ Line 131: / Line 94: @@
 <cite>page 174ff in "The Emperors new Mind" by R. Penrose</cite></blockquote>
+<blockquote>It turns out that the abstract [[basic_tools:phase_space|phase fluid]] has the same proper-
+ties as a real fluid that is incompressible. An incompressible real fluid is one in which any volume-element of fluid (any sample of neighbouring ‘particles’) cannot be compressed, that is, it keeps the same volume. Likewise, for the phase fluid we may examine any small 2n-dimensional volume-element within the fluid, and watch this volume as it is ‘carried along’ by the flow. Although the shape of the volume-element may become distorted yet its total volume always remains unchanged:<cite>The Lazy Universe by Coopersmith</cite></blockquote>
+<tabbox Concrete>
+Liouville's theorem tells us that the flow of the probability density $\rho(t,\vec p,\vec q)$ is incompressible. The probability density is a non-negative real quantity that tells us the probability that we'll find a particle with momentum $\vec p$ at the position $\vec q$.
+In general, for a function $\rho(t,\vec p,\vec q)$ we have
+$$
+\frac{\mathrm d}{\mathrm dt} \rho(t, \vec p(t), \vec q(t)) =\frac{\partial \rho }{\partial t}+ \sum_{i}\left(\frac{\partial \rho}{\partial q_i}\,\dot{q_i}+\frac{\partial\rho}{\partial p_i}\,\dot p_i\right) .
+$$
+Now, if $\rho$ is constant $\frac{d \rho }{d t}= 0$, then the left-hand side is $0$ and we get:
+$$\frac{\partial \rho }{\partial t}= -\sum_{i}\left(\frac{\partial \rho}{\partial q_i}\,\dot{q_i}+\frac{\partial\rho}{\partial p_i}\,\dot p_i\right).$$
+This is a dynamical equation for the time-evolution of $\rho(t,\vec p,\vec q)$ that follows when the flow of the probability density $\rho(t,\vec p,\vec q)$ is incompressible, i.e. $\frac{d \rho }{d t}= 0$.
+----
+Take note that Liouville's theorem can be violated by any of the following:
+  *  sources or sinks of particles;
+  *  existence of collisional, dissipative, or other forces causing $\nabla_{\mathbf{p}}$ $\cdot$ $\mathbf{F}$ $\neq$ 0;
+  *  boundaries which lead to particle trapping or exclusion, so that only parts of a distribution can be mapped from one point to another;
+  *  spatial inhomogeneities that lead to velocity filtering (e.g., particle drift velocities that prevent particles with smaller velocities from reaching the location they would have reached had they not drifted);
+  *  temporal variability at source or elsewhere which leads to non-simultaneous observation of oppositely-directed trajectories;
+  *  etc. [_Paschmann and Daly_ 1998].
+<tabbox Abstract>
+<blockquote>The intuition for the Lagrangian principle comes specific applications of Newton's laws, especially reversible systems with constraints, like nonspherical particles rolling along complicated surfaces. Newton's formulation of Newton's laws was not the end of the story, because there was more structure in the solutions of these types of problems than that which Newton made obvious.
+One thing left unsaid by Newton is conservation of energy. Elastic processes are more fundamental than inelastic ones. But energy conservation is only part of the story. Suppose you have a bunch of masses connected by springs, and one of them is attached to a double-pendulum. You could theoretically have energy conservation in such a system by having all the energy leak out of the masses on the springs and go into the double pendulum. Perhaps every frictionless motion of the springs eventually settles all the energy into a single mode.
+Your intuition is probably rebelling, telling you "that's infinitely unlikely! How could the pendulum move around and not set the springs vibrating!" But there is nothing in Newton's laws by themselves, even with the principle of conservation of energy, that prevents this sort of concentration of energy. But the solutions do not exhibit such phenomena, and there must be a reason why.
+This intuition tells you that a perfect frictionless mechanical system is more than energy-conserving, it must conserve some notion of "motion-volume", so that if you alter the initial state by a certain amount, the final state should alter the same way. It can't concentrate all motion into one mode. This principle is the principle of conservation of phase-space volume, or the conservation of information. If all the motion got concentrated into one mode, the information about where everything was would have to get absurdly compressed into a tiny region of the phase space, the space of all possible motions.
+The conservation of information is just about as fundamental as Newton's laws of motion--- it is revealing new facts about nature which are essential for the description of statistical and quantum systems. But it is nowhere to be found in Newton's formulation, because it does not follow from Newton's laws alone, even with the principle of conservation of energy added.
+So you need to understand what type of law will give a law of conservation of information. There are two paths to go down, and both lead to the same structure, but from two different points of view, local in time and global in time.
+One path is Hamiltonian: you consider formulating the law of motion as a set of symplectic equations for the position and momentum. This formulation clearly separates between reversible and irreversible dynamics, because it only works for reversible. It also explains the fundamental mathematical structure behind reversible classical mechanics, the symplectic geometry. The volume of symplectic geometry gives the precise law of information conservation, and further, the geometrical structure of systems with multiperiodic solutions, the integrable systems, is made clear.
+But this point of view is centered on a time-slicing--- it describes things going from one instant of time to another. This is not playing very nice with relativity. So you also want to think about the solution globally, and consider the space of all solutions as the phase space. The initial position and velocities are good coordinates, and intuitive ones, because they determine the future. But if you want a global picture, you want coordinates which are symmetric between the final and initial state, since the dynamics are reversible. An explicit revesible description should treat the initial time and final time symmetrically. So you can use the initial positions and final positions, which also, generically, away from certain bad choices, determine the motion.
+For these types of coordinates on phase space, you give the dynamical law as a condition on the trajectory between the intial and final positions. The condition should not be stated as a differential equation, because such a description is unnatural for boundary conditions of this sort. But when you have an action principle, you determine the trajectory by extremizing the action between the end points, you automatically have a notion of phase space volume, which is intuitive--- the phase space volume is defined by the change in the action of extremal trajectories with respect to changes in the initial velocities. This volume is the same as for the changes of the extremal trajectories with respect to changes in the final velocities. This is a straightforward consequence of the equivalence of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulation.
+The full justification for both principles comes only with quantum mechanics. There you learn that the least action principle is a geometric optics Fermat principle for matter waves, and it is saying that the trajectories are perpendicular to constant-phase lines. But historically, the Lagrangian formulation was recognized to be more fundamental a century before Hamilton conjectured that classical mechanics was a wave mechanics, and this was many decades before Schrodinger. Still, with our modern point of view, it does not hurt to learn the quantum version of these formulations first, and it certainly provides a more solid motivation than the heuristic considerations I gave above.
+<cite>https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/15958/37286</cite></blockquote>
+<tabbox Why is it interesting?>
 <tabbox FAQ>

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