Thermodynamics of blackbody radiation via classical physics for arbitrarily shaped cavities with perfectly conducting walls

An analysis is carried out involving reversible thermodynamic operations on arbitrarily shaped small cavities in perfectly conducting material. These operations consist of quasistatic deformations and displacements of cavity walls and objects within the cavity. This analysis necessarily involves the consideration of Casimir-like forces. ces. Typically, even for the simples t of geometrical structures, such calculations become quite complex, as the y need to take into account changes in singular quantities. Much of this co mplexity is reduced significantly here by working directly with the change ill electromagnetic fields as a, result of the deformation and displacement changes. A key result of this work is the derivation that for such cavity structures, classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation is the appropria te spectrum at a temperature of absolute zero to ensure that the reversible deformation operations obey both isothermal and adiabatic conditions. In a ddition, a generalized Wien displacement law is obtained from the demand th at the change in entropy of the radiation in these arbitrarily shaped struc tures must be a state function of temperature and frequency.