Talk:Principle of minimum energy

I wouldn't say that the problem with the article is one of neutrality. Rather the difficulty is that the author wanted to address a misconception about the difference between energy and free energy and he/she lost sight of the rest of the content that the article needed. So I think this article is a sincere is somewhat ill-conceived attempt to address a subject that WP:Physics should address. However, I would think that the topic would be better addressed under free energy or canonical ensemble rather than principle of minimum energy, which is a bit of an obscure title. Alison Chaiken 18:32, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

I would agree that there are misconceptions out there but when I look up this principle in other locations on the web I find it is always mentioned as "the principle of minimum energy" and it is always mentioned in connection with entropy. I think the title of the article should stand but the content needs to be tweaked a little. I will try to do that now.J S Lundeen 14:54, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Move to minimum total potential energy principle and replacement
I have moved the former contents of the page to the minimum total potential energy principle page which is essentially the same thing. I have replaced it with the minimum energy principle for constant-entropy systems, as described in Callen (1985) "Thermodynamics and and introduction to Thermostatistics". PAR 02:09, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Doesn't mention Grand potential
I think it's worth pointing out that an open system (open to particles and energy) in a fixed volume tries to reach the minimum of Grand potential rather than a minimum of Helmholtz potential. The article as is focusses on fixed-mass systems. I am however not 100% familiar with this stuff, so I'll leave it to someone else for now. --Nanite (talk) 12:21, 26 May 2013 (UTC)
 * The article's title is minimum energy principle. This reasonably precludes considering systems that are open to energy.  The Grand potential is a thermodynamic potential, and so could well be included in an article on the general topic of all thermodynamic potentials, but there is really no need to include it here, not even to mention it.  Too much inclusion just makes things more incomprehensible.98.109.241.146 (talk) 05:12, 11 June 2013 (UTC)