Thermodynamics and Gravitation: From Glasses to Black Holes and Globular Star Clusters

Abstract

The topic of this conference is ``The Chaotic Universe''. One of the main achievements of last century has been to relate chaos in fluids to their thermodynamics. It is our purpose to make connection between chaos in gravitation and standard thermodynamics. Though there have been many previous steps and attempts, so far no convincing conclusion has been reached. After explaining how the approach works for glasses, we shall discuss the thermodynamics of two specific systems: black holes and globular star clusters. In both cases we point out that the dynamics satisfies the first and second law of thermodynamics, though negative specific heats occur.