You can beat entropy, man

[redbird]

Yes, I have a Weblog for this sort of thing. I'm putting it here anyway.

Now where was that second-order perpetual motion machine?

Comments

[avram]

The first paragraph of the story, the one that says the Second Law of Thermodynamics "has been shown to be untrue", overstates matters. It's long been known (I remember reading about it in the late '80s, when I was first reading popular science books on quantum mechanics) that the fundamental principals of physics, like the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy, can be violated at extremely small scales of space and time.

[mneme]

Ayup -- the impact of the article (which was in PRL, the Physics Review spun-out lettercol, rather than the peer reviewed journal itself) is that the long-expected occasional reversal of energy on extremely small scales has been observed, rather than just theorized.

Also, the "impact" projected on nanotechnology" isn't correct -- the scale on which quantum effects happen is much smaller than the molecular scale that nanotech is likely to be built on; the chance of the projected "nanotech running backwords" event is astronomical.

Cool headline, though.

[mneme]

Or....it really could have mindblowingly huge impacts on nanotech -- "[E]ntropy-consuming
trajectories can be discerned for *micron*-sized particles on time
scales on the order of *seconds*"

So yes, this isn't -really- a reversal of the Second Law...but yes, it certainly -does- have amazing impact for nanotech, which would be built on that scale.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I agree with the other commenters; I'm not convinced there's anything really new here. And I'm definitely skeptical that this effect can be used to produce useful work.

B

my favourite line...

[webbob.livejournal.com]

"The finding has implications for nanotechnology - the design and construction of molecular machines. They may not work as expected."

For myself, if nanotechnology works, that will not be as expected. I'm not a great believer in nanotechnology so far as I've seen it espoused: it reminds me of the way we were going to be able to massively compress information with fractals.

In the case of this article, I'd like to see more about what the basis for claiming a spontaneous decrease in entropy is before judging it.

I think it's clear that a lot of what goes on in molecular mechanisms of biology runs damn close to equilibrium, and hence to reversability even under classical thermodynamics, I think. And large molecules may have clever ways to jigger good old ΔG = ΔH - TΔS to minimize ΔS. But something about the experiment as reported doesn't satisfy me.

P.S. I'm perpetually disappointed that the Gibbs gas stations charge for chemical energy (thermodynamics joke: ΔG is the symbol for the Gibbs Free Energy).