Ah, so I’m working at a level of generality that applies to all sorts of dynamical systems, including ones with no well-defined volume. As long as there’s a conserved quantity , we can define the entropy as the log of the number of states with that value of . This is a univariate function of , and temperature can be defined as the multiplicative inverse of the derivative .
You still in general to specify which macroscopic variables are being held fixed when taking partial derivatives. Taking a derivative with volume held constant is different from one with pressure held constant, etc. It’s not a universal fact that all such derivatives give temperature. The fact that we’re talking about a thermodynamic system with some macroscopic quantities requires us to specify this, and we have various types of energy functions, related by Legendre transformations, defined based off which conjugate pairs of thermodynamic quantities they are functions.
By
I mean
for some constant that doesn’t vary with time. So it’s incompatible with Newton’s law.
And I don’t believe this proportionality holds, given what I demonstrated between the forms for what you get when applying this ansatz with versus with . Can you demonstrate, for example, that the two different proportionalities you get between and are consistent in the case of an ideal gas law, given that the two should differ only by a constant independent of thermodynamic quantities in that case?
Oh, the asymmetric formula relies on the assumption I made that subsystem 2 is so much bigger than subsystem 1 that its temperature doesn’t change appreciably during the cooling process. I wasn’t clear about that, sorry.
Since it seems like the non-idealized symmetric form would multiply one term by and the other term by , can you explain why the non-idealized version doesn’t just reduce to something like Newton’s law of cooling, then?
Here is some further discussion on issues with the law.
For an ideal gas, the root mean square velocity is proportional to . Scaling temperature up by a factor of 4 scales up all the velocities by a factor of 2, for example. This applies not just to the rms velocity but to the entire velocity distribution. The punchline is, looking at a video of a hot ideal gas is not distinguishable from looking at a sped-up video of a cold ideal gas, keeping the volume fixed.
Continuing this scaling investigation, for a gas with collisions, slowing down the playback of a video has the effect of increasing the time between collisions, and as discussed, slowing down the video should look like lowering the temperature. And given a hard sphere-like collision of two particles, scaling up the velocities of the particles involved also scales up the energy exchanged in the collision. So, just from kinetic theory, we see that the rate of heat transfer between two gases must increase if the temperature of both gases were increased by the same proportionality. This is what Newton’s law of cooling says, and it is the opposite of what your proposed law says.
Here is a further oddity: your law predicts that an infinitely hot heat bath has a bounded rate of heat exchange with any system with a finite, non-zero temperature, which similar to the above, doesn’t agree with how would understand it from the kinetic theory of gases.
Material properties such as thermal conductivity can depend on temperature. The actual calculation of thermal conductivity of various materials is very much outside of my area, but Schroeder’s “An Introduction to Thermal Physics” has a somewhat similar derivation showing the thermal conductivity of an ideal gas being proportional to √T based off the rms velocity and mean free path (which can be related to average time between collisions).