Image: Michael Morgenstern
In Brief
- Waste is unavoidable—a sad fact of life quantified by the famous second law of thermodynamics. But if the world is steadily becoming more disordered, how do you explain the self-organization that often occurs in nature? At root, the trouble is that classical thermodynamics assumes systems are in equilibrium, a placid condition seldom truly achieved in the real world.
- A new approach closes this loophole and finds that the second law holds far from equilibrium. But the evolution from order to disorder can be unsteady, allowing for pockets of self-organization.
Science has given humanity more than its share of letdowns. It has set limits to our technology, such as the impossibility of reaching the speed of light; failed to overcome our vulnerabilities to cancer and other diseases; and confronted us with inconvenient truths, as with global climate change. But of all the comedowns, the second law of thermodynamics might well be the biggest. It says we live in a universe that is becoming ever more disordered and that there is nothing we can do about it. The mere act of living contributes to the inexorable degeneration of the world. No matter how advanced our machines become, they can never completely avoid wasting some energy and running down. Not only does the second law squash the dream of a perpetual-motion machine, it suggests that the cosmos will eventually exhaust its available energy and nod off into an eternal stasis known as heat death.
Ironically, the science of thermodynamics, of which the second law is only one part, dates to an era of technological optimism, the mid-19th century, when steam engines were transforming the world and physicists such as Rudolf Clausius, Nicolas Sadi Carnot, James Joule and Lord Kelvin developed a theory of energy and heat to understand how they work and what limited their efficiency. From these nitty-gritty beginnings, thermodynamics has become one of the most important branches of physics and engineering. It is a general theory of the collective properties of complex systems, not just steam engines but also bacterial colonies, computer memory, even black holes in the cosmos. In deep ways, all these systems behave the same. All are running down, in accordance with the second law.
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66 Comments
Add CommentIf I understand correctly, Maxwell's Demon can exist, in local area within a larger framework. Can it also be isolated?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIsn't this obvious, though, that there will be pockets of order in any system that obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics?The net gain of entropy will always increase, but there will be a certain amount of self-organization. However, for this self-organization to take place, much more energy must be put in than what can be collected again and removed. It is only paradoxical when considered in terms of one concept, such as the temperature of the ice in water: disorder is bound to re-order itself in certain cases, but this is cancelled out and surpassed by the other concepts which order themselves - therefore entropy in every case is increasing, no matter whether certain concepts suggest that entropy is decreasing and the system is becoming more ordered. This is from limited knowledge in the subject, so please excuse (and ignore) if my theory of it all is incorrect!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA wonderful article. Rubi's insights should be standard reading for all students of thermodynamics. I got the definite impression from his paper that the creation of isolated "islands" of order is more probable for small systems, making me wonder if living systems, particularly at the molecular level, are the inevitable consequence of Rubi's reconsiderations of the Second Law. Also, just as steady-state currents give rise to magnetostatics, shouldn't undergraduate texts be talking instead about "thermostatics"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust for fun, from John Milton's Paradise Lost, Book V, lines in the vicinity of 790, has Lucifer (nt yet Satan) talking to his as yet unfallen fellows: "But orders and degrees jar not with liberty, but well consist."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisit is confusing that this article does not give strict definitions for heat,temperature and energy.Conclusions are therefore a guessing game.Actually the auther gives the answers for these physical phenomena.by citing for the elctric toaster,the wire inside it heats up because the wire material offers resistance to the flow of electric currentSince electric current is a flow of electrons,electrons represent energy,resistence means the accumulation of electrons,which heats up the wire,hence electric current represent also heat and is energy, temperature is apparently conserved heat.Important is to understand that heat flows with the speed of light,hence is electomagnetic radiation.vandillewijn,mramire8@bellsouth.net
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn thermodynamics, two basic idealized processes are possible - the Carnot engine and the Carnot refrigerator. One can look at these as complementary computational dynamics. Engines produce usable while refrigerators require it to operate. It seems that apparent paradoxes of the 2nd Law are merely examples of the latter including living systems, intelligent systems (reduce entropy to make decisions), and of course refrigerators. Indeed, it is the pervasiveness and expansion of living human intelligent systems that is a source of the current energy crisis. None of this seems that complicated or paradoxical. Guess I agree with the post by The Newt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnder Quantum mecanics, electrons are in all states at all times. So how does entropy apply to them?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article does raise some very valid points.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJiff
www.anonymity.cz.tc
How is it a new framework? There are a whole host of books already covering everything this article says, including why nature does not break the second law.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI suggest you read "Into the Cool: Energy, Thermodynamics and Life" by Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan (2005).
http://www.amazon.com/Into-Cool-Energy-Flow-Thermodynamics/dp/0226739368
Wolfram proved that complex patterns emerge and there is no such thing as "true chaos" because there is always a pattern, regardless of how long and arcane the structures are.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWisps of smoke or dye in water do not suddenly make 90 degree slices in calm summer air, for example. It's simple and enough of a pattern for our brains (which are pattern recognition/response systems) to recognize and even conceptualize and depict.
Thermodynamics has also been proven wrong with over-unity: The ability to get back more energy than you invest (which does actually work, granted: there is no known perceptual motion machine to date but it's possible to use the ambient forces of Earth's own radiation belt and magnetics to keep a magnetrode rotating for years at a time to power a generator).
The sad truth is that we have new data and the old rules do not adequately explain the possible spectrum of actions because there are exceptions (as there are to every rule ever conceived).
The reason we have order from chaos is natural selection from random events.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI dont understand.. I thought it was understood that even if the universe and living system in particular are moving toward higher entropy they can become more ordered. It seems like a paradox, but many ordering processes create more entropy then their disordered counterparts, especially if they are coupled with other processes. This is something you learn your freshman year of college or even high school.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI dont understand.. I thought it was understood that even if the universe and living system in particular are moving toward higher entropy they can become more ordered. It seems like a paradox, but many ordering processes create more entropy then their disordered counterparts, especially if they are coupled with other processes. This is something you learn your freshman year of college or even high school.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The Achilles heel of thermodynamics is that, strictly speaking, it applies only when the system under study is in a quiescent state called equilibrium."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI thought that the 2nd law only applied until equilibrium was achieved!!!
Someone correct Wikipedia!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
Aw gee guys. From the second law: In a closed system. Of if you prefer: An isolated system.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat means no matter and no energy enter or leave the system under study. If you want to invoke the second law, there are no exceptions to this part of the rule.
What is the difference between the work described in this article and all the work that has been done over the last 70 years in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, particularly by people such as Prigogine?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps the divergences could be explained eaisly if we consider that order and disorder are human percepcions of the flux of energy from a system to another system. The point would be that order/disorder are only contextual descriptions of entropy, while the fundamental concept is the availability of microstates towards which the energy can be dispersed. Under the last viewpoint, there is not contradictions on the second law of thermodynamics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps the divergences could be explained eaisly if we consider that order and disorder are human percepcions of the flux of energy from a system to another system. The point would be that order/disorder are only contextual descriptions of entropy, while the fundamental concept is the availability of microstates towards which the energy can be dispersed. Under the last viewpoint, there is not contradictions on the second law of thermodynamics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"For instance, when one heats up one of the ends of a metal bar, heat flows through the bar toward the other end. The temperature difference between the ends of the bar acts as a force driving the heat flow, or flux, along the bar. A similar phenomenon occurs with a drop of ink in water. The difference in ink concentration is the driving force that makes the ink invade the host liquid until it becomes uniformly colored."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is the source of "temperature" or "concentration" that powers gravity? Isn't Gravity just another example of "flow"?
"For instance, when one heats up one of the ends of a metal bar, heat flows through the bar toward the other end. The temperature difference between the ends of the bar acts as a force driving the heat flow, or flux, along the bar. A similar phenomenon occurs with a drop of ink in water. The difference in ink concentration is the driving force that makes the ink invade the host liquid until it becomes uniformly colored."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is the source of "temperature" or "concentration" that powers gravity? Isn't Gravity just another example of "flow"?
The second law of thermodynamics says that when an isolated system reaches equilibrium it's entropy reaches it's maximum value. What it doesn't says is that if the system remain in equilibrium it has NO entropy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe universe is the only isolated system in equilibrium, witch means energy is infinite and is has no entropy, hence is not going to melt down. It is going to keep creating things forever.
Apparently equilibrium is a state in which chaos is undetectable, chaos is a state in which equilibrium is undetectable, and perception is not a reliable basis for reasoning.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll of you need to read the energy evolution by Victor Schauberger. This will give you insight as to why laws of thermodynamics do not apply to any part of nature. the fact that cold groundwater rises and thus forms springs, that rivers all over the world are found in certain spots running uphill all due to a natural vortex which squares the velocity of the input rather than the opposite laws that modern science so desperatly grasps. The world could be a much better place if we could just learn from nature rather that constantly challenging that what we do not understand.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll of you need to read the energy evolution by Victor Schauberger. This will give you insight as to why laws of thermodynamics do not apply to any part of nature. the fact that cold groundwater rises and thus forms springs, that rivers all over the world are found in certain spots running uphill all due to a natural vortex which squares the velocity of the input rather than the opposite laws that modern science so desperatly grasps. The world could be a much better place if we could just learn from nature rather that constantly challenging that what we do not understand.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll of you need to read the energy evolution by Victor Schauberger. This will give you insight as to why laws of thermodynamics do not apply to any part of nature. the fact that cold groundwater rises and thus forms springs, that rivers all over the world are found in certain spots running uphill all due to a natural vortex which squares the velocity of the input rather than the opposite laws that modern science so desperatly grasps. The world could be a much better place if we could just learn from nature rather that constantly challenging that what we do not understand.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe 2nd law cannot be broken in nature because the arrow of time points always towards the future.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNature can never break a scientific law, it is not possible because science is nature, check your premises.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthank you, there is always a pattern, look behind the randomness, you will find the answer. Its like somebody finds a million dollars in an alley because they took a short cut. They might consider themselves lucky that they where late, but it is not a random event, a thief or somebody dropped the money and because they where late they found it, there is a logical reason, find the pattern and don't be lazy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe destructive nature of modern science if unchanged will see to it that we have no future.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll of you need to read the energy evolution by Victor Schauberger. This will give you insight as to why laws of thermodynamics do not apply to any part of nature. the fact that cold groundwater rises and thus forms springs, that rivers all over the world are found in certain spots running uphill all due to a natural vortex which squares the velocity of the input rather than the opposite laws that modern science so desperatly grasps. The world could be a much better place if we could just learn from nature rather that constantly challenging that what we do not understand.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn short, I feel the author is repeating some common senses in the whole text. He should focus more on how life origin from universe .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've been thinking about defining life itself in terms of thermodynamics; my definition in progress is
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Life is a spontaneously auto-catalytic process or system that decreases local entropy, subject to the zeroeth law of thermodynamics." (more at http://meshula.net/wordpress/?p=195)
Life is often defined as an ad hoc melange of rules:
homeostasis (regulation of internal state, something robots can do)
organization (limits life to cellular organisms - virii are not life by convention)
metabolism (consumption of energy to create cellular components)
growth (maintaining a higher rate of synthesis than catabolism)
adaptation (some simple organisms have remained largely the same for millions of years - are they therefore not alive?)
response to stimuli
reproduction (are worker bees not alive?)
One can fiddle away on these rules trying to refine them and catch border cases, but it never really pans out.
The systems theory definition of life states that live things self-organize and self-reproduce. This is closer to what I am after, but not strong enough to make predictions, or to address faults and ambiguities within the ad hoc conventional definition.
Erwin Schr�dinger wrestled with the question and came close to what I think is the right definition when he suggested that living systems import and store negative entropy or negentropy.
By stating that life reduces entropy locally, but global entropy is conserved, I think that the apparent contradiction of life versus thermodynamics is resolved.
The total amount of energy is constant, and there is one kind of energy,only. Entropy increases if transformable energy increases but not necessarily in dynamic equilibrium system such as group formation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs everyone in question knows there is one kind of energy, only. Total amount of energy is constant. More exactly when transformable energy increases then entropy increases in dynamical equilibrium systems. The constant transforms into entropy without organization, totally. Not very credible.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMore exactly when amount of transformable energy increases entropy increases. Total amount of energy is constant. Consistently, the total energy transforms into entropy. How about dynamic equilibrium systems such as human group formation; organization or not?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA fascinating article. One of the reasons I really enjoy Scientific American and my RSS feed from them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNow, how can I get gas to flow back into my Grand Marquis to replace the energy lost to entropy? Just sold one in which my repair guy wired the gas gauge drawkcab. The tank refilled itself. Does that count?
Sir Isaac, Galileo, Ol' Nick never dreamed what their discoveries would give birth to. Ditto this.
The question has been raised whether Nature violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere, the Permeable Cellular Wall provoking a closed system finds entirely different set of circumstances providing passage within and without of the cell.
The entropy state of heat transfer at which can be absorbed doesn’t apply to an organic cell and its structural content.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is used by opponents of Evolution; this includes the Creationists, who also like to front Thomas Aquinas and his five reasons for God.
Roy D. Schickedanz
Refuting Charles Darwin in the case of Life’s Responsive Design
Total nonsense. The second law states that the entropy of the universe always increases. The entropy of any closed system with an external energy input may decrease while increasing the entropy of the universe outside the system. This is very basic thermodynamics as taught in introductory classes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think this is a good thought.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe entropy of the universe is ever increasing, but we see pockets of galaxies and even within our own we have become less chaotic, organizing into a nice system with gravity controling the movements of the planets. Isn't our own solar system proof of a low entropy system existing in an high entropy environment? The net gain is still there, but we have our individual pockets of low entropy systems. How the universe is expanding, but gravity overcomes it in small scales.
further to my earlier comment,mathematics is a human invention and can be adjusted to requirements for natural phenomena not the other way round,hence when the phenomenon is wrongly understood,one gets
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswrong mathematics.Heat transfer in nature is a continuous process,and is paralled by radiation to have the observed systems in equilibrium,or in other words any heating process automatically combines with radiation of energy which was not undrstood by the originators of enthropy.Heat transfer in the environment by the solar radiation is going on for more than 4 billion years and according to estimates of the sun's life it will continue another 4 billion years and there are no signs of increased chaos.Most probably during the invention of entropy,the church influence was rather great and it predicted the collapse of the world,which these people liked to prove and there are more questionable theories.The electron's wavelength is 2.42x10^-3 nm,which is an intrinsic value,how can this be changed when circling the atom nucleus,moreover the electron has no rest mass,how can it circle the nucleus,imagine in this light quantum mechanics.frederik
In Everything Forever, Gevin Giorbran suggests that we a advancing from a extreme Alpha grouped state (all matter no space to a Omega (all space no matter) symmetry ordered state. The Omega is the equalibrum point of a positive and negative mirror .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTime is just a transformation from one state of order to another. Nice web site (Everythingforever.com.
Bad Article, chaos is merely the spontaneous transition from a higher order to a lower order.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMoreso, the driving force of all thermodynamics is probability amplitudes in quantum mechanics. The momentum, angular momentum, and energy are always conserved in these simple diffraction reactions (any time 1 particle "collides" or electromagnetically repels off of another particle), and yet entropy occurs explicitly due to the particle-wave duality and the difrractive uncertainty principle of the quantized particles that make up the systems of atoms and molecules that classical thermodynamics uses in the equations. In essense, brownian motion is really a wave diffraction effect to begin with, and hence pressure and temperature are too.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMithremakor (12:54 PM, 10/29/08) said it. In biology class, one of the first thermodynamic questions deals with entropy. The living organism decreases its entropy temporarily by increasing the entropy of its surroundings. On a very simple level, the organism can gain energy by breaking down complex molecules, increasing their entropy. That energy is used to create complex structures inside the organism, creating an area of decreased entropy. A neat trick but not a mystery. The entropy of the system as a whole (organism + surroundings) increased.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe fact is that systems tend to organize over time, i.e., move towards sophistication. Again we see the "opposing forces" concept inherent to all things in the Universe. Everything must have an opposite to exist because the Universe is made of nothing, just divided into it's opposites. For example, a company has accounts payable and accounts receivable. If they are both equal, the company has zero value. Very ying yang.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are deceived by an unfortunate coincidence in terminology. Classically defined, "heat" consists in atomic/molecular kinetic energy (i.e.: energy of motion on the atomic level). Since atoms and molecules are massive objects, they cannot move at the speed of light and their kinetic energy cannot be transmitted at light speed either.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisElectromagnetic radiation below the visible range is sometimes called (incorrectly) "heat radiation", primarily because of the subjective sensation of warmth, when it is incident on skin surfaces. This misnomer is the source of your confusion.
The problem lies in the definition of "order" and the scale on which that definition applies. In convective systems, for example, the appearance of large scale ordering in the form of Bernard cells creates enhanced transport of thermal energy along the temperature gradient in the medium. The resulting large increase in entropy at the microscopic level more than compensates for a relatively small decrease in entropy corresponding to the fluid cells.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe work of Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine on irreversibility in micro physics is implicitly vindicated in the recent article of J. Ambjorn in scientific American. The point may be as follows: Quantum mechanics may appear reversible, however quantum gravity is not. The resolution may be found in fractal spacetime as argued by Mohamed El Naschie and Ervin Goldfain (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-self-organizing-quantum-universe)
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA couple of years ago a controversy erupted in Egyptian newspapers regarding the arrow of time and order out of chaos. Nobel Laureate in experimental chemistry, Egyptian born Ahmed Zuwail gave a lecture transmitted by television from the Opera House in Cairo. He said the arrow of time can never be broken. A week later, a second celebrity, Egyptian scientist, Mohamed El Naschie gave a lecture in the same place and also transmitted by some satellite stations declared that the arrow of time could be broken as indirectly indicated in this article citing the fundamental work of Nobel Laureate, Ilya Prigogine. Interestingly, neither Zuwail nor El Naschie is specialized in thermodynamics. Zuwail works on femto chemistry and is a renowned experimentalist. El Naschie is an engineer and works in quantum gravity and fractal spacetime which means he is a theoretician. To be fair to Zuwail, it should be mentioned that El Naschie was a close friend of Prigogine, so no wonder he knows about his profound work which earned him a Nobel Prize.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe present article is a lucid presentation of the philosophical pitfalls which lead to sweeping wrong generalizations. I still recall how many idiotic comments were made by totally ignorant journalists about this subject at the time.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDrs. John Baez from UC, Riverside and Skoda Zoran of no fixed address known to me expressed recently their deep surprise about Dr. El Naschie’s use of the 17 stein spaces. The surprise is really mine. I am deeply surprised that they think there is nothing called two and three stein spaces. In fact they said it doesn’t make even sense and they don’t know that there are 17 of them. This is truly surprising because it is a well known fact - a textbook stuff rather than cutting edge research. The classification of one, two and three stein spaces is given in the modern textbook on Riemannian geometry. Not surprisingly one stein space is an Einstein space. The spaces are deeply connected to compact and non-compact exceptional Lie symmetry group. They are exactly 17 and the sum of their dimension is exactly 686 as indicated for the first time by El Naschie. I wish people will get their facts right before we need to have an International Journal for Misinformation whose function is to correct all the nonsense littering certain blogs. People are already experimenting with a new fine mesh Google to filter away the coarse grained nonsense. An additional surprise is that Dr. John Baez is indeed an exceptional mathematical physicist who has introduced many imaginative ideas to knot theory and quantum gravity and he should know about the stein spaces.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDear Colleagues and readers of this particular Scientific American site:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI must seriously and full-heartedly congratulate you for the high standard of your discussion. What impressed me most is that although the stakes are very high and despite various allegations, the niveau never sank to the level of some of the so-called scientific blogs. Yes it may well be that Prof. Renate Loll or Prof. John Ambjorn have overlooked the work of Prof. El Naschie or Prof. Erwin Goldfain. However, the dispute was a dispute between scientists. By contrast I was truly disgusted to an extent of nausea with this blog called: The n-Category café. The blog maestro is a well known mathematician Prof. John Baez. He is genuinely a Professor at UC Riverside, USA. But if you read what this gentleman has written from slander, defamation and lies against many people particularly Prof. El Naschie, you will shudder. Ironically all his so-called mathematical arguments are false and what is more disturbing he knows so. But the true shock came to me when I was informed and subsequently was able to confirm that Dr. Baez was also in Spinoza Institute in Utrecht, Holland. It pains me indeed to conclude from the many publications he has had with Dr. Loll and Dr. Ambjorn that this was a concerted action against Mohamed El Naschie to divert attention from the real issue of possible plagiarism. Is the pressure of obtaining grants and money from the Government is so great that scientists on this level as Prof. Baez can forget the most rudimentary principle of morality and integrity and launch such a vicious attack against his colleagues just to help them get funding? How could the directors of centers of excellence such as Spinoza Institute in Utrecht University allow one of the members to disregard priorities and indulge in a campaign of self-publicity on the account of others just to obtain money for the Institute? It is preposterous to see that once this was discovered then instead of apologizing and giving credit here credit is due with an intelligent word of apology, then they ask their colleague to work as their vigilante assassinating the character of innocent people? Nothing was sacred for Dr. Baez. He invented names, distorted facts, and went as far as saying that Prof. El Naschie who got his Ph.D. from University College, London under the supervision of Lord Henry Shilver and Sir M. Thomson, FRS has no Ph.D. and is not a Doctor.
He claimed further that Prof. El Naschie lives in Surrey which is unbefitting an editor in chief of Chaos, Solitons & Fractals and that he runs a cult and a sect which is totally devoted to him. How could anyone dish out so much trash and still call himself a Professor? If you don’t believe me visit his respectable blog and read for yourself. Even if he has done all that and defamed both Elsevie, an all commercial publishing, with despicable words out of friendship to Dr. Loll and Dr.Ambjorn with or without their approval, then it is still unforgiveable for anyone who calls himself a man let alone a Professor and scientist. What is more embarrassing is that Spinoza Institute hosts one of the greatest scientists of all times, Prof. Gerardus ‘tHooft and yet Dr. Baez who is proud of being the cousin of the legendary Joan Baez, of the flower power generation and is putting it in his CV, did not shrug from using the good name of Prof. Gerardus ‘tHooft to achieve his less than honorable purposes. Nowhere in his comments has he indicated that he is a co-author of Loll and her editor. Just the opposite he pretended to be concerned about the future of mathematics and what the transfinite theory of spacetime could ruin. If El Naschie’s theory is so bad and so wrong, I have only one question to ask you Dr. Baez and all the pseudo names you have surrounded yourself with: Why are you plagiarizing it? Secondly, before you start making of 2 and 3 stein spaces and say it does not exist, and before you make fun of Nash embedding and making totally wrong conclusions, and before you make sarcastic remarks about the E Line of the exceptional Lie group which according to you does not exist, why do not you learn first your mathematics before you make big words. I do not have a great love lost for commercial publishing but they have their good sides because they evade the old boys clubs. What is really despicable are the majority of the self-styled so-called scientific blogs and their owners. In this sense and knowing that Scientific American is a commercial publishing I give them my sincere appreciation and congratulate them on their professionalism and impartiality.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics defines a "process" and should not be confused with "states". Along with the First Law, the Law of Conservation, the Second can be used to describe the transition from state to state. Equilibrium is a defined state and is really used to describe a theoretical condition where time derivatives are set to zero. In reality, no system is truly at Equilibrium until the state arrives at absolute zero, i.e., the Third Law of Thermodynamics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLove this thinking from your article about the Second Law of Thermodynamics: In simple terms, some may think it violates the thermodynamic entropy theology, that we have all been indoctrinated with. By the way: I consider thermodynamic science more a theology and manifest scotoma in our lexicon, rather than a fact. In my own humble opinion physics is incalculable, and to rely on definitions, is to limit physics or existence itself. Neither have limits, therefore - in my puny assumptive world Physics is forever a living definition, as well as a fixed proof. Much as Infinity is both sides of the same coin at once. Therefore I would argue thermodynamic entropy (or the second law) is relative for like for like kinetic actions: which will diminish force , as it today properly outlines. However if you change the Like for Like concepts when generating energy, you change the rules by which thermodynamic entropy was developed. In other words, If you use 2 dimensions to generate kinetic energy, complemented in equal response to 1 dimension, generating its own energy. You alter (augment) the output energy produces. Hence the like for like action = reaction is modified and the results are not like for like. Action can multiply Re-action. This provides for a gear ratio that augments energy output using natural forces. As well as other forces (fossil fuels too.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have two similar ideas, that use natural forces to create continuous motion , without using any fossil fuels. They will work. I am currently looking for someone with a mathematical and electronic background to work with me. If anyone is willing, I will send you further information.
Thank you,
Russ Otter
Indio, CA. USA
760.238.0471
Love this discussion from your article about the Second Law of Thermodynamics: In simple terms, some may think it violates the thermodynamic entropy theology, that we have all been indoctrinated with. By the way: I consider thermodynamic science more a theology and manifest scotoma in our lexicon, rather than a fact. In my own humble opinion physics is incalculable, and to rely on definitions, is to limit physics or existence itself. Neither have limits, therefore - in my puny assumptive world – Physics is forever a living definition, as well as a fixed proof. Much as “Infinity is both sides of the same coin – at once.” Therefore I would argue thermodynamic entropy (or the second law) is relative for “like” for “like” kinetic actions: which will diminish “force”, as it today properly outlines. However if you change the “Like for Like” concepts when generating energy, you change the rules by which “thermodynamic entropy” was developed. In other words, If you use 2 dimensions to generate kinetic energy, complemented in equal response to 1 dimension, generating its own energy. You alter (augment) the output energy produces. Hence the “like for like” action = reaction is modified and the results are not like for like. Action can multiply Re-action. This provides for a gear ratio that augments energy output using natural forces. As well as other forces (fossil fuels too.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have two similar ideas, that use natural forces to create “continuous motion”, without using any fossil fuels. They will work. I am currently looking for someone with a mathematical and electronic background to work with me. If anyone is willing, I will send you further information.
Thank you,
Russ Otter
Indio, CA. USA
760.238.0471
Thermodynamics is derived upon a closed and isolated system. Humans, bacteria are not isolated, nor closed (the Universe).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSaying that the second law applies for such systems shows profound ignorance for the essence of thermodynamics. This is why i am surprised that The Scientific American and physics PhD's are writing this story.
Thermodynamics is derived upon a closed and isolated system. Humans, bacteria are not isolated, nor closed (the Universe).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSaying that the second law applies for such systems shows profound ignorance for the essence of thermodynamics. This is why i am surprised that The Scientific American and physics PhD's are writing this story.
I read this article after one of my students complained of being confused about the arguments being made. After reading the article, I have to concur that you have begun using a very confusing direction which is not a standard approach to the 2nd law, which consist of the idea of order and disorder and the definition of entropy. Yes, The Laws of Thermodymamics concerns itself with the flow of hear, really energy. But your examples in the first half of this article confuses the issue, and it seems to do so for the sake of proving that Biologist have some confusion in how we interprest the 2nd Law.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes we do. But this article would help students with better developed examples. You do not bring into your argument that the 2nd Law requires a closed system, which is a source for confusion from Biology, since the systems that we are interested in are open systems. Only when looked at from a larger scale, looking at metabolic processes not from the cellular or organism level but from the level of the ecosystem returns us to a closed system to some extent.
The Laws of Thermodynamics have not be proven wrong, but our interpretations of them has left out the parameters in which these laws were made. That is an error the recurs repeatedly in science. In very robust laws, not paying attention to such parameters does not affect the results to a large extent. But at some point, the law will not seem to work. This point you alluded to, but you did not develop. And it is in this point that I feel a weakness in your article for students.
So glad SciAm featured this article. A search of the whole site reveals, however, that in all the years since 1993 this is the first time Ilya Prigogine, 1977 Nobel Laureate in chemistry, is mentioned by Scientific American. Does this not reveal some kind of bias, a failure to discern important new trends in physics and cosmology? Still, at least this article brings the topic of non-equilibrium systems to the attention of readers.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPlease forgive this late read and reply to osakanone, but regarding the magnetrode, (which souds like a very cool thing) that is not perpetual is it. Would it not continously rely in the radiation belt of the Earth and a host of other things that will change and are going down, and therefore be subject to entropy in the end. Forgive me, if I do not know what I am talking about, but it seems that Entropy keeps coming through. All the examples, as I glibly understood, of chaos going to order, required energy to do so, and once the energy submitted to entropy then so would the temporary chaos to order. I am thinking that this temporary chaos to order is all part of the road to entropy in the end. I hope all that does not reveal how utterly uninformed I am, but if anyone would like, please correct my thinking if it incorrect.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's a proven fact that the 2nd law of thermodynamics if "wrong" and has been shown to be wrong . The universe would seas to exists if it was correct ! Lee and yang have proven it and got a Nobel prize for it ... Ranque-Hilsch Effect Tube ("vortex tube")is as well . Hundreds of overunity devices . And there are Perpetual systems ... they have been for a long long time .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy the way i believe that there are 24 + versions of the 2nd law of thermodynamics .
Read Tom Bearden's documents or here his link on 2nd law ( google Tom Bearden 2nd law of thermodynamics )... that is if you don't want to keep living in the middle ages ( actually the ancient Sanskrit and Greek text as well as Sumerian also describe the existence of aether gas or radiant energy and such energy ( Universal ) HAS to supply overunity ..which in turn ( as stated above) has to defy the 2nd law ...
http://www.cheniere.org/articles/2ndLaw.htm
In my opinion Physicists around 1880 -1920 knew far more than we do at present ( thanks to JP Morgan and the same bunch controlling the curriculum for schools and universities since early 1900 ) and fascinating is that the ancient world seems to have known even more about the Universe than we ever did because the skills of observation and experimentation where not manipulated by false mathematics or "laws" ... but where based on experiments and observation without the crippling restrictions of our fake prophets of physics .... or our Mathematical Gods . The answers to the most complex scientific problems lie in Philosophy rather than mathematics or laws .
and a law comes from observation .... once you see something that was previously hidden your law has to be changed or revoked . And Science has shown a previously hidden source of Energy and this HAS to change the entire dynamics of entropy ( my understanding from my non scientific background .. i could be wrong ) ... as in the case of Tom Bearden :
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn potential theory, when the B-field (curl or swirl of the magnetic vector potential) is shielded and localized in that fashion, then in the space where the B-field would ordinarily be but now is not present, there appears a "field-free" and "swirl-free" or "curl-free" A-potential. This potential does affect the electrons there, even though there rigorously is no "magnetic field B" there at all.