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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

#21

Post by eli_gottlieb »

cableshaft wrote: post #20
azurelogic wrote: post #11

Countdown to a sci-fi movie where this idea is only half understood and the "proof of concept" device opens a portal to hell, where we meet the real Maxwell's demon... Now that I've typed this, I want to see it happen.

Wasn't that the plotline in the most recent Doom game?

Several Doom games, and also Half-Life. Ripping a hole into Hell for travel purposes has been done in Doom, the movie Event Horizon, and the tabletop gaming franchise Warhammer 40K.

Which goes to show what a terrible idea this all is ;-).

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

#23

Post by pbnjay »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #18
azurelogic wrote: post #11

Countdown to a sci-fi movie where this idea is only half understood and the "proof of concept" device opens a portal to hell, where we meet the real Maxwell's demon... Now that I've typed this, I want to see it happen.

If so, one can't get into or out of hell unless you're going this fast.

88mph of course...

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

#24

Post by maxerickson »

btilly wrote: post #12
hammock wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ironically someone downvoted you for this comment. I guess that they didn't understand how exactly true your statement is. In essence the entire biosphere is a giant heat engine, mainly fed off of the flow of energy from the Sun to Earth to outer space, and in some extreme environments fed by the radiation of heat out from the core of the Earth. Shut off those flows of energy, and the second law would shortly catch u…

Shut off the flow of energy and the cold would catch up to us a long time before the second law of thermodynamics.

(our frozen, desiccated corpses would probably retain their organization longer under such conditions)

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

#25

Post by yk »

mabbo wrote: post #2

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

Decreasing entropy locally is usually called a fridge, and I am currently betting my dinner that it is not bullshit. (I don't have the slightest idea what the article is actually talking about.)

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

#26

Post by ivan_gammel »

The best thing with local and short-term effects is that eventually someone finds the way to extend the space and time boundaries a bit, then a bit more and then we are talking about astronomical scale.

Can be a nice story plot for a sci-fi book, in which science finds the way to defer the rise of enthropy to some almost infinitely distant moment in future (that end of time, we've always being expecting) and move the boundaries of locality to the observable universe. What a world that would be.

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

#27

Post by TeMPOraL »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #21
cableshaft wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't that the plotline in the most recent Doom game?

Several Doom games, and also Half-Life. Ripping a hole into Hell for travel purposes has been done in Doom, the movie Event Horizon, and the tabletop gaming franchise Warhammer 40K. Which goes to show what a terrible idea this all is ;-).

Also done in an excellent though unfinished series of books, The Salvation War[0]. Albeit travel was only a side effect of the real goal there.

[0] - http://www.tboverse.us/HPCAFORUM/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=29 - full text of Armageddon and Pantheocide available there; the author decided to abandon the series because someone stole his work to destroy his ability to publish it.

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

#28

Post by cmdrfred »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #21
cableshaft wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't that the plotline in the most recent Doom game?

Several Doom games, and also Half-Life. Ripping a hole into Hell for travel purposes has been done in Doom, the movie Event Horizon, and the tabletop gaming franchise Warhammer 40K. Which goes to show what a terrible idea this all is ;-).

Don't forget Minecraft.

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

#29

Post by bryondowd »

powrtoch wrote: post #14
digi_owl wrote: 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.

Yeah. The impression I get from this article (which is pitifully short on specifics) is that they're going to exploit some of the seemingly-nonlocal properties of QM, like quantum teleportation. So, a normal refrigerator decreases entropy in one region and increases it in another, but they're directly adjacent regions and the entropy (heat) is moving from one to another along a simple, everyday path (like a heat exha…

Is it sad that my second thought reading that was of weaponization. Depending on how you project this energy, you could put it somewhere very much unwanted. Or the opposite, remove it from somewhere very much needed.

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

#30

Post by eli_gottlieb »

api wrote: post #16

I recall having an idea at least a bit similar to this years ago when I was heavily studying evolutionary informatics. Some particularly avant garde types in that field have posited that the universe rather than having two constituents -- matter and energy -- has three primary first-order constituents. The third is information. Information is not merely an epiphenomena of matter and energy but a primary "thing." If t…

>Some particularly avant garde types in that field have posited that the universe rather than having two constituents -- matter and energy -- has three primary first-order constituents. The third is information. Information is not merely an epiphenomena of matter and energy but a primary "thing."

Is that really so avant-garde? It seems a bit weird to claim that thermodynamics and the arrow of time are epiphenomena when we can measure the relevant quantities experimentally. The more avant-garde thing seems to be the kinds of papers where they claim space-time or gravity are somehow emergent from entropy/information.

>If that is the case then there should be an E=mc^2 type equation that relates matter to information and energy to information and all three should be interconvertible.

Uhh, why? Even the more exotic physics-of-information work seems to end up equating entropy with space-time or something like that: mass-energy would bend space-time-entropy, but wouldn't be convertible into it.

Admittedly, this is all way above my head.

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