ABSTRACT
Originally, thermodynamics was created to describe the statistical behavior of physical systems. However, its formalism can be applied to arbitrary systems such that it is possible to determine the states corresponding to the fixed values of some quantity, “energy” E. This quantity has to be additive with respect to the elements of an ensemble of systems. Both physical and social energies can be considered as the concrete representations of such abstract energy. In this chapter, we present the general scheme of derivation of the basic thermodynamical quantities and relations from statistical mechanics of abstract systems. They can be either physical or social (or arbitrary biological systems, or even AI systems). Classical and quantum statistics correspond to ensembles of distinguishable and indistinguishable systems, respectively (see sections 1.6 and 4.3 for a discussion on indistinguishability of information excitations and its operational meaning).
