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Argonne researchers posit way to locally circumvent Second Law of Thermodynamics

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

#31

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 Minecraft, where it's called the Nether, and where every meter traveled in the Nether moves you eight meters on the surface.

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

#32
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Do nothing, and entropy still will catch up to us. Maybe. In the form of our environment collapsing, or the sun exploding, or something else.

Even take a single human. Dust (to person) to dust. Ashes (to civilization) to ashes.

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

#33

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 ;-).

Nonono, Half-Life was about opening a portal to a Hypervisor.

Xen. It could be worse, it could have been the QEMU dimension.....

:)

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

#34
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 consisting of two compartments that are separated by a wall, where one of the compartments contains N particles. The system has low entropy because all the particles are on one side of it. Now, if you remove the barrier between the two compartments, particles will distribute evenly on both sides, increasing the entropy of the system. If we assume that the position of the particles is random, the probability of finding all of them on one side of the system is (1/2)^N, which quickly converges to zero for most macroscopic systems, which often contain > 10^23 particles.

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

#35
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…

If you could figure out how to remotely power a space habitat with nothing but downloaded prawn streams and lolcats, you, good sir, will end up ruling the galaxy, whether you want to or not.

If useful quantum information-to-energy conversion requires an observer, you will also solve the planet's unemployment problem.

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

#36
I don't see what the big deal is. Let's try the ideal gas. For starters temperature ∝ Kinetic energy

We have two rooms. One were molecules all travel at speed A and other room molecules travel at speed B and we open a small window.

Eventually, over a long period of time the temerature in both rooms will settle at a temperature between that of B and of A.

Let's try to formule this mathematically. This is something like the mean value theorem in calculus that f'(C)(B-A) = f(B) - f(A) for some intermediate value C. And here are function f(C) is the equilibrium temperature.

In statistical mechanics we imagine we could count the number of particles -- 10^23 or 10^25 -- something very large. And some fraction M travel at speed A and N-M of them travel at speed B. And we count the probabilities of various mixtures occurring.

Feynman Lectures on Computation is a great book https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-Computation-Richard-...

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

#37
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.

Quantum Mechanics is pretty damn solid. I expect they'll find their evidence, and figuring out that something is possible in QM is more than good enough reason to try it.

If that turns out to be false then QM will have been disproven, which is even bigger news!

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

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gives a whole new meaning to spooky action at a distance.

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

#39
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…

> Information is not merely an epiphenomena of matter and energy but a primary "thing." 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.

I'm not sure I agree with this premise, but one thing I've been musing about is that there's probably an information-theoretic lower bound for the amount of energy it takes to transmit a given quantity of data a given distance. You can pick different points along a curve (higher bandwidth/higher frequency signals need higher power to produce a given SNR, and lower-bandwidth/lower-frequency signals can produce the same SNR at a lower power) but there is some asymptotic energy limit there that you cannot beat unless you have an infinitely sensitive receiver.

Anyway, what I'm going for here is that your unifying theorem there would probably be Shannon-Hartley, since that deals with the transfer (derivative) of information. The "noise" is whatever natural equilibrium opposes the transformation process, and your SNR dB is the equivalent of the rate constant in chemistry.

It's all fairly useless without some idea of how we convert hashes back into energy of course. Without that, there is insufficient data for a meaningful answer.

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

#40

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"?

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