On July 25, 2005 I announced several new papers in the Institute for Theoretical Physics. I never finished so many papers in a short period. The considered fields were very different: classical and quantum physics, an overview of a conference, biophysics and quantum gravitation, foundations of quantum mechanics and of special relativity. None of the eight co-authors was at that time affiliated with the University of Amsterdam. With four of them I have no previous publications.

ITFA-2005-29: Th. M. Nieuwenhuizen,
Classical phase space density for the relativistic hydrogen atom, quant-ph/0511144. Proceedings of Quantum Theory: reconsideration of foundations-3, June 6-11, 2005, Växjö University, Sweden. AIP Conference Proceedings 810, to appear (Melville, New York, 2006), ISBN 0-7354-0301-5.
An insight underlined by our results on quantum measurements is that quantum mechanics only describes statistics of outcomes of experiments: Individual experiments occur in nature, but we have no theory to describe them. This has led me to consider more complete theories. In the present approach I consider a classical description for the quantum mechanical hydrogen atom. It deals with the electron's Newtonian motion in the Coulomb potential of the nucleus, its Lorentz damping and an unspecified but weak noise mechanism, that prevents the electron to fall in the nucleus by kicking it away. A stable ground state is supposed to arise from this setup. In this paper I propose phase space densities, that, by construction, reproduce the quantum probabilities (squares of wavefunctions) in coordinate space.
Some insights follow, while, to put it mildly, at least one puzzle shows up.

ITFA-2005-30: V. Spicka, Th. M. Nieuwenhuizen and P.D. Keefe,
Physics at the FQMT'04 Conference, Physica E, to appear.
In July 2004 I co-organized a very fine conference in Prague, Frontiers of Quantum and Mesoscopic Thermodynamics. This paper summarizes the recent state of the art of the following topics presented at the FQMT'04 conference: Quantum, mesoscopic and (partly) classical thermodynamics; Quantum limits to the second law of thermodynamics; Quantum measurement; Quantum decoherence and dephasing; Mesoscopic and nano-electro-mechanical systems; Classical molecular motors, ratchet systems and rectified motion; Quantum Brownian motion and Quantum motors; Physics of quantum computing; and Relevant experiments from the nanoscale to the macroscale. To all these subjects an introduction is given and the recent literature is overviewed. There are some 450 references.

ITFA-2005-31: A.E. Allahverdyan and Th.M. Nieuwenhuizen,
Resolution of the Gibbs paradox via quantum thermodynamics, Phys. Rev. E, submitted, quant-ph/0507145 .
In 1875 the founding father of statistical physics Josiah Willard Gibbs pointed at the following paradox: Take two equal volumina of different gases and mix them. Then the entropy increases by and amount k log 2 per particle. But if the gases are equal, there is not such an increase. The paradox lies in the discontinuity: there is an increase no matter how small the difference between the gases, but not when they are equal. This raises questions such as: if the gases are composed of similar balls, red ones for the first gas, blue ones for the second, then what should a color-blind experimentator conclude? In other words: the mixing entropy is not operational.
There has been a long effort to resolve the paradox, which shows a limit of phenemenological thermodynamics. It was believed to be solved by the quantum mixing entropy argument, but that was shown to create a new problem at almost the same spot.
Assuming that the translational degrees of freedom of both gases are in thermal equilibrium at the same temperature, we express the differences between the gases by their internal (spin) structure. The latter involve a few degrees of freedom. Therefore we approach the problem via quantum thermodynamics, the theory of thermodynamics for small quantum systems connected to a macroscopic bath and a macroscopic work source. In this field we notioced before that the notion of entropy is messy, the physical quantity is work. The maximal amount of work that can generally be extracted from a finite quantum system was already derived in a paper with R. Balian: the so-called ergotropy. This allows to consider the maximal amount of work that can be derived before and after mixing. The difference is the mixing work or mixing ergotropy. Unlike the mixing entropy, the mixing work is continuous when the gasses become more and more equal. And the extractable work is an operational concept, it depends on the work extraction process employed.
This solves the Gibbs paradox using quantum mechanics alone.

ITFA-2005-32: A.E. Allahverdyan, R. Balian and Th. M. Nieuwenhuizen,
Phase Transitions and Quantum Measurements, quant-ph/0508162. Proceedings of Quantum Theory: reconsideration of foundations-3, June 6-11, 2005, Växjö University, Sweden. AIP Conference Proceedings 810, to appear.
In a quantum measurement the pointer of the apparatus has to go from its metastable initial state to a stable final state. We have previously considered a quite physical model where a spin 1/2 is measured by coupling it to an Ising magnet, which itself consists of N spins 1/2 and a bath. The magnet starts in its metastable paramagnetic state and ends up in one of its stable ferromagnetic states, the magnetization up (down) state if the tested spin was up (down).
In this paper we consider for an apparatus with a second order phase transition the related question how an initially slightly unstable paramagentic state ends up in its stable ferromagnetic state with magnetization up or down. If the coupling to the external field is too weak, the system may end up in the ``wrong'' state with finite probablity. This is related to the Burridan's ass effect, where an ass, placed between two stacks of hay, dies by starvation, because he cannot choose which to eat first. (An effect so far not observed by me.)

ITFA-2005-33: A.E. Allahverdyan, Zh.S. Gevorkian, Chin-Kun Hu and Th.M. Nieuwenhuizen,
Adhesion Induced DNA Naturation, cond-mat/0512237, submitted.
Adhesion of DNA to a wall will typically make the two strands stronger bound and lead to an unexpected collective effect. We find a region of Borromean binding, where the potentials that try to adsorb the individual strands to the wall are too weak to do so, while also the interstrand potential is too weak to naturate (bind) the two strands. Nevertheless, their combined effect may yield a bound state of naturated, adsorbed DNA.
(The weapon shield of the "famiglia Borreomeo" contains three connected rings. When one is taken out, the other two are also no longer bound, symbolizing the strength of cooporation. Magicians often perform tricks based on this type of binding.)

ITFA-2005-34: C. Pombo and Th. M. Nieuwenhuizen,
Observational Derivation of Einstein's ``Law of the Constancy of the Velocity of Light in Vacuo'' , physics/0510127 . To appear in Proceedings of Quantum Theory: reconsideration of foundations-3, June 6-11, 2005, Växjö University, Sweden. AIP Conference Series.
In his annus mirabilis 1905, Einstein adopted the constancy of the speed of light as a principle. It demonstrated here that it can actually be derived on the basis of a physical condition: for a lamp at rest, the observed frequency does not change when the light is absorbed and re-emitted in a frame moving at constant speed between the lamp and the observer.

ITFA-2005-35: Th. M. Nieuwenhuizen and I.V. Volovich,
Role of Various Entropies in the Black Hole Information Loss Problem, hep-th/0507272.
In 1975 Steven Hawking showed that black holes evaporate, creating a thermal spectrum, as if it were a black body. This poses the information paradox: information about the matter that went in the black hole, does not seem to come out.
One of the biggest mysteries of the macroscopic world is irreversibility/relaxation. Hawking has the opinion that there is conservation of information in theories with unitary dynamics. Actually this assertion is far from being obvious. There are various types of information (entropy) which behave differently under unitary dynamics. The problem is studied in statistical physics starting with Boltzmann. Even for ordinary gases it is not solved yet. One of the basic advances in the study of this problem is the Bogoliubov idea about two relaxation timescales.
In this paper, we consider the black hole information problem as an example of the famous irreversibility problem in statistical physics and mention various fine grained and coarse grained entropies that play a role. Next we outline a derivation of an analogue of the Boltzmann equation in quantum gravity along the lines of Bogoliubov's derivation for gases.