41–50 of 144 posts
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.
The second law of thermodynamics isn't really a fundamental physical law, but rather a promise based on statistics that says "disorder will increase or stay constant in a closed physical system". That said, it's entirely possible for entropy to spontaneously decrease in a closed system, the probability of this happening is just astronomically small for typical macroscopic systems. Example: If you have a system consis…
The second law of thermodynamics is as fundamental as the uncertainty principle: The former is a result from markov chains and information theory, the latter is a result from fourier analysis of conjugate variables. What would you consider a "fundamental physical law"?
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.
And the portal is in some guys fridge.
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.
And the portal is in some guys fridge.
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.
The impression I get from the article is that the newsworthy idea here is that those two locations might not need to be directly connected. This would permit what looks like a perpetual motion machine. But overall the 2nd law would still hold because entropy is increasing somewhere.
Note: I'm not a physicist so don't take my word for this. Just conveying what I think I read.
http://www2.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/ExorcistXIV/Exorcist1....
http://www2.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/ExorcistXIV/Exorcist2....
...and to ease into things, an article by one of the authors:
"The Simplest Exorcism of Maxwell's Demon -- No Information Needed"
https://web.archive.org/web/20140309110028/http://www.pitt.e...