Marginal and Conditional Second Laws of Thermodynamics

Abstract: We consider the entropy production of a strongly coupled bipartite system. The total entropy production can be partitioned into various components, which we use to define local versions of the Second Law that are valid without the usual idealization of weak coupling. The key insight is that causal intervention offers a way to identify those parts of the entropy production that result from feedback between the sub-systems. From this the central relations describing the thermodynamics of strongly coupled systems follow in a few lines.