Thermodynamic uncertainty relations and irreversibility (Q578763)

The Cramér-Rao lower bound for the minimum variance of an unbiased estimator is derived from the second law of thermodynamics. The inequality is in the form of an uncertainty relation for conjugate thermodynamic variables where the minimum uncertainty occurs for reversible processes in which the conjugate variables are completely negatively correlated. An upper bound on the probability for arbitrarily large deviations in the energy is given in terms of the difference in entropies at the initial temperature of the body and the final equilibrium temperature of the medium.