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Argonne researchers posit way to locally circumvent Second Law of Thermodynamics

anl.gov

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Re: Argonne researchers posit way to locally circumvent Second Law of Thermodynamics

#5
post #2

Someone smarter than me: why is this totally bullshit and will never work?

The second law of thermodynamics just follows from statistics and a large number of interacting particles. It's not actually inviolable as the article says. There are whole books written about far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics, and the fluctuation theorem quantifies the probability of entropy increasing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuation_theorem

Re: Argonne researchers posit way to locally circumvent Second Law of Thermodynamics

#7
post #3

Could have sworn that one of the tricky things about that law was that while it may appear that you are decreasing entropy locally, you are just increasing it somewhere else, thus entropy still increased in aggregate.

Why do you have to swear? We (lifeforms) are living, breathing examples of that concept.

Re: Argonne researchers posit way to locally circumvent Second Law of Thermodynamics

#8
> "Although the violation is only on the local scale, the implications are far-reaching," Vinokur said. "This provides us a platform for the practical realization of a quantum Maxwell's demon, which could make possible a local quantum perpetual motion machine."

> For example, he said, the principle could be designed into a "refrigerator" which could be cooled remotely — that is, the energy expended to cool it could take place anywhere.

Perhaps there's another definition, but as far as I'm aware, a PPM has net negative/zero energy input from anywhere, be it local or remote.

That said, apart from hyperbolic misapplication of terminology (not a PPM, no circumventing Second Law), this does sound like interesting research.

Re: Argonne researchers posit way to locally circumvent Second Law of Thermodynamics

#9
post #6

"The authors are planning to work closely with a team of experimentalists to design a proof-of-concept system, they said." - Pardon if I'm mistaken, but this seems like a fancy way of saying they have no evidence at all so far.

Like many theories... Peter Higgs et al had to wait ~50 years for evidence.
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