The Second Law is No More

graysquirrel
Ok, which is it. Is the second law violated thus also violating a law of thermodynamics.
Or, Is It consistent with all laws of thermodynamics including the second law?

www.newscientist.com...

Their results are also in good agreement with predictions of the "fluctuation theorem", a theory developed at ANU 10 years ago to reconcile the second law with the behaviour of particles at microscopic scales.

graysquirrel
Fundamental laws of physics are laws because there are no exceptions! Not one!

Only someone unfamiliar with laws of science would make such a statement. There are exceptions to many laws, not just the second law of thermodynamics.

en.wikipedia.org...

Copernicus was not exactly right because Kepler's laws are more precise. Kepler's laws are not exact because Newton's laws are better. Newton's laws are not exact because general relativity is better. General relativity is not exact because it doesn't take quantum mechanics into account. Probably no natural law is exactly true.

We could make long lists of exceptions to laws, but to sum it all up as George Box said:

"All models are wrong. Some are useful."

The things we call laws are useful. But they are not without exceptions.

Actually the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics have higher accuracy rates as models, than the concepts referred to as "laws" but even those theories are not complete models and we admit it.

reply to post by alfa1


I am astounded at your smug ignorance.

if a dirty bedroom is to become clean, energy must be expended to do so. therefore, an organized bedroom has a higher energy potential than a disorganized one.

the relative configuration of ANY particles to one another, regardless of their size, is a representation of the heat of the system. clean bedrooms are cold. dirty bedrooms are hot.

thermodynamics is not some strange phenomena which applies only to whatever systems you appear to be imagining. it applies to all systems, everywhere, all the time.

tgidkp
if a dirty bedroom is to become clean, energy must be expended to do so. therefore, an organized bedroom has a higher energy potential than a disorganized one.

No.
And you can prove this to yourself with a similar experiment:
if an organized bedroom is to become dirty, energy must be expended to do so. therefore, a dirty bedroom has a higher energy potential than an organized one.

Simply because energy is used to do something, does not automatically mean that the result is anything "better/worse/higher/lower" in terms of thermodynamics or entropy.

tgidkp
the relative configuration of ANY particles to one another, regardless of their size, is a representation of the heat of the system.

No.
In the first sentence, you're speaking of the physical location of atoms.
In the second sentence you're speaking of heat.
There is no connection between the two.

And besides, the "heat of the system" is a pointless topic to bring up in this example, since the second law of thermodynamics only speaks of heat *transfer* and relative status, not (as you seem to think) the total amount of heat in the system.

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases...
And that is ALL it states.

And to find out what that means, you have to know what Entropy means.
Entropy is a measure of the number of specific ways in which a thermodynamic system may be arranged.

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Example 1: A chess board with chess pieces.
The pieces are neatly set up in the starting positions. Placed there with great care to ensure they are all lined up perfectly and in the middle of the squares.

Example 2: The same chess pieces.
In this example, somebody has taken the time to freeze the white pieces, and heat up the black pieces.
Whites are cold, Blacks are hot.
And then randomly scattered them all about. Some are even broken.

Question for you : Which has the lower entropy?

graysquirrel
I don’t know why anybody else has not observed this, So, I will make the observation here

I would like to draw your attention to an article in the journal Nature. Here is the link.

www.nature.com...

To summarize, a researcher created and placed a very large number of self rolling balls on a race track. According to the second law to thermal dynamics such arrangement would result in a very large number of randomly moving self rolling balls. However, it was observed that, the balls alined then selves and traveled as an organized group around the race track.

This is a violation of the second law. And, It only takes one example to debunk a law.

Any thoughts?



As a side note, this is experimental prove of the channelized air effect (CAE) and other concepts as described in my thread.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Actually this is not an unknown phenomenon. It's cause is the single most fundamental law of nature. Chaos into order which is the direct opposite of entropy.

I think the key word used here is Emergence... It is a word that will become more and more widely used in the next couple of decades.

Emergent systems exhibit coherent behavior that it's individual components are not directly programmed for. In a machine you have components that are build specifically to do a job, that component along with all the other components all work together to achieve a specific goal or goals.

However, in Emergent systems the components are not designed specifically towards the over all goal and can be seemingly completely unrelated, it is through the interaction of each component that creates an overall effect.. an emergent effect.

It has been postulated that Dark Energy the energy that we believe is responsible for the acceleration of the universes expansion is an emergent property if the universe. In other words there is no specific force at work, it is a result of many components working together to create the effect.

Intelligence / the weather / the structure of galaxy clusters and the spiral formations on a cauliflower are all examples of emergence...

All of it comes down to chaos theory.

So.... the 2nd law of thermodynamics is essentially stating that in a closed system the entropy is capped at a level where there is equilibrium... which is true... it is also modified by the introduction of chaos theory to create order from the chaotic system set up when multiple balls are released in this experiment.

The energy state of the balls does indeed equal out so the 2nd law is verified... the behavior of the balls is down to the randomness of the system that created order.

Peace,

Korg.

reply to post by Korg Trinity

Emergent systems exhibit coherent behavior that it's individual components are not directly programmed for. In a machine you have components that are build specifically to do a job, that component along with all the other components all work together to achieve a specific goal or goals.

However, in Emergent systems the components are not designed specifically towards the over all goal and can be seemingly completely unrelated, it is through the interaction of each component that creates an overall effect.. an emergent effect.

Exactly the point of the experiment in the OP. An emergent phenomenon is one wherein simple "rules" result in complex behaviors. For example, atoms tend to fill all their electron shells. This is not by choice or design, but the emergent result is called "chemistry." Emergent phenomena can build upon one another. Quantum rules create chemistry, which creates biology, which creates mind.

reply to post by Korg Trinity


So, You are saying that if we modify the second law with chaos theory, this OP experiment does not violate any laws. You do realize that this new arrangement does allow for the legal existence of a self organizing particle based free energy system.

I'm happy with that.

As for the OP title, The old second law that I was taught in collage which had no exceptions / loop holes is no more.

alfa1

tgidkp
if a dirty bedroom is to become clean, energy must be expended to do so. therefore, an organized bedroom has a higher energy potential than a disorganized one.

No.
And you can prove this to yourself with a similar experiment:
if an organized bedroom is to become dirty, energy must be expended to do so. therefore, a dirty bedroom has a higher energy potential than an organized one.

Simply because energy is used to do something, does not automatically mean that the result is anything "better/worse/higher/lower" in terms of thermodynamics or entropy.

That's true, but the concept of entropy relates the diversity of accessible states, where states include positions and momenta of particles. There are fewer different ways items can be arranged in a 'neat' way vs a 'messy' way, so if you use as your coordinates the degrees of freedom of macroscopic object positions then yes the neatened bedroom has lower entropy than the messy one and looking at entropy using information theory, the probability distribution of neat bedrooms (averaging over all possible neat configurations) has lower entropy than messy ones.

It's a bit more complicated because in the above circumstance, when you look at books, clothes and tables as the coordinates in human space the effective "temperature" is zero. Unlike elementary particles, they aren't all spontaneously moving around among accessible 'neat' states among trajectories which conserve total energy and momentum, but microscopic statistical mechanics deals with that situation.

The second law of thermodynamics arises from the property of chaos from particle collisions which is a nearly universal empirical phenomenon when you have a squillion elementary particles without long-range interactions.

Complex interactions can have complex properties which include ordering and spontaneous pattern generation if you have more macroscopic collective couplings. In the referenced Nature article the mechanism is hypothesized to be "hydrodynamic interactions"---this means sound in the polar fluid in which the colloids are suspended. This is the long-range coupling which could induce macroscopic order.

Consider motion of charged particles in a plasma---the electric and magnetic fields can have strongly ordering properties among the elementary particle setting up a zoo of phenomena.

In all these cases if you looked at the total degrees of freedom of every single microscopic particle then there is no doubt that conventional thermodynamics is still active---but if you restrict your degrees of freedom to a certain set of macroscopic ones with long-range interactions you do get intriguing behavior. It's difficult, complicated physics but it isn't Against The Law.

reply to post by alfa1

And to find out what that means, you have to know what Entropy means. Entropy is a measure of the number of specific ways in which a thermodynamic system may be arranged.

well... sort of. better stated: entropy is a quantitative measure of the number of informational bits required to represent a micro-system from a macro-level (as in the gas law, re: boltzmann).

a system which is in a state of totally random distribution of particles is at maximum entropy. this is because there is no 'shorter' description (in bits) of the system than an explicit representation of each particle individually. a large number of bits required. high entropy.

a system which has the same particles arranged into segregated states is at lower entropy. this is because a description of the system can be truncated into a shorter description than the random distribution. we may use a single bit of information to represent the entire contents of any single segregated partition.

so, to answer your question, example 1 has much lower entropy than example 2. the partitions of states in example 1 allow us to truncate its description into (white, lined up, middle) and (black, lined up, middle): low entropy. example 2 will require an explicit description of the state of every single piece, individually: high entropy.

so, now that i have passed your quiz. i do not mind being corrected, and i found many of your corrections appropriate. you stated that it also requires energy to transition from a clean room to a dirty room. you are referring to a different type of energetic transaction than i am. ALL transitions require an energy of activation. once activation has been achieved, tendency toward increasing entropy takes over and the system quickly 'falls down' to a lower energy level, producing heat in the process (exothermic). a clean bedroom becoming dirty requires activation energy only.

a dirty bedroom becoming clean requires activation energy. it also requires energy to be stored within the relative configurations of bedroom particles. the organized configuration, a lowering of the entropy, becomes an internal storage medium for energy. the system must be 'pushed up' to a higher energy state, reducing heat in the process (endothermic).

a cold system becomes heated relatively easily (clean -> dirty).
it is not easy for a heated system to become cold (dirty -> clean).
the state of the system, its total heat content, is entirely relevant to the thermodynamic transistions available.




relevant to the OP:

from the cited article:

All these (living and man-made) model systems (bacteria, biofilaments and molecular motors, shaken grains and reactive colloids) predominantly rely on actual collisions to generate collective motion....

The large-scale behaviour of the populations therefore strongly depends on uncontrolled (and unknown) microscopic couplings.

"actual collisions" refers to a specifically random energetic transaction. in other words, we are observing a system which appears to have maximum entropy as its initial state. after some period of time, the system's particles achieve a "collective motion". their unified state is a descriptive partition in the state of the overall system: a decrease of entropy.

according to the paper, there are certain unknown "microscopic couplings" which are influencing the transition from high to low entropy. it is hypothesised that these couplings exist within the microscopic system, itself, and therefore we are describing it as a 'closed system'.

given the information in the abstract, quoted above, and assuming a high level of academic and scientific integrity of the people performing the experiments, "The Second Law is No More" is a valid generalization of the results obtained by the experiment.

Our experiments demonstrate that genuine physical interactions at the individual level are sufficient to set homogeneous active populations into stable directed motion.

"individual level" = closed system
"homogeneous" = maximum entropy
"stable directed" = lower entropy


The OP, and his claim, are supported.

DJW001
reply to post by Korg Trinity

 

Emergent systems exhibit coherent behavior that it's individual components are not directly programmed for. In a machine you have components that are build specifically to do a job, that component along with all the other components all work together to achieve a specific goal or goals.

However, in Emergent systems the components are not designed specifically towards the over all goal and can be seemingly completely unrelated, it is through the interaction of each component that creates an overall effect.. an emergent effect.

Exactly the point of the experiment in the OP. An emergent phenomenon is one wherein simple "rules" result in complex behaviors. For example, atoms tend to fill all their electron shells. This is not by choice or design, but the emergent result is called "chemistry." Emergent phenomena can build upon one another. Quantum rules create chemistry, which creates biology, which creates mind.

edit on 11-12-2013 by DJW001 because: (no reason given)

100% correct!

It's amazing how so few people understand what thermodynamics is all about, let alone quantum effects in macro objects!

Peace,

Korg.