3 ms·

Someone smarter than me: why is this totally bullshit and will never work?

• jrpt 10y ago
  The second law of thermodynamics just follows from statistics and a large number of interacting particles. It's not actually inviolable as the article says. There are whole books written about far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics, and the fluctuation theorem quantifies the probability of entropy increasing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuation_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuation_theorem
  • platz 10y ago
    Right, the second law simply is a result of selecting a result from a probability distribution that increases entropy, but drawing from tails of the distribution aren't impossible, only highly improbable.
• shoegumfoot 10y ago
  Haven't read the paper, but it sounds like they just rediscovered the microcannonical ensemble (but for quantum mechanics). Probably works, probably hard to do anything interesting with it in the near to medium term.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• yk 10y ago
  Decreasing entropy locally is usually called a fridge, and I am currently betting my dinner that it is not bullshit. (I don't have the slightest idea what the article is actually talking about.)