5 ms·
Could have sworn that one of the tricky things about that law was that while it may appear that you are decreasing entropy locally, you are just increasing it s
by digi_owl 10y ago
Could have sworn that one of the tricky things about that law was that while it may appear that you are decreasing entropy locally, you are just increasing it somewhere else, thus entropy still increased in aggregate.
- hammock 10y agoWhy do you have to swear? We (lifeforms) are living, breathing examples of that concept.
- btilly 10y agoIronically 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 up to us and we'd all perish.
- maxerickson 10y agoShut 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)
- hammock 10y agoDo 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.
- btilly 10y agoBecoming cold requires a flow of energy outwards. If you put a perfectly reflective energy shield above our atmosphere and about 2 miles down, we would not get cold. We would just wind up all dead at a uniform temperature.
- tpeo 10y agoI'm no physicist, but isn't the cold a result of the second law? Or is the second law a consequence of the dissipation of heat? Also, is thermodynamic entropy applicable to organized matter?
- maverick_iceman 10y agoIt is applicable to everything.
- raattgift 10y agoBut as they're frozen, the ratio of possible microstates to each colder, dryer macrostate increases tremendously. S = k log W. Entropy sets in well before algor mortis.
- powrtoch 10y agoYeah. 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 exhaust tube). It sounds like the researchers have proposed using some quantum-teleportation-like trick to have the heat show up in some unconnected region of space.
- bryondowd 10y agoIs 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.
- foota 10y agoGives a whole new meaning to spooky action at a distance.
- snowwrestler 10y agoImagine location A experiences an entropy decrease Y. To compensate, location B experiences an entropy increase >Y, and thus the 2nd law of thermodynamics is upheld. Under typical conditions, those two locations must be directly connected. The biosphere of the Earth, which is a local decrease in entropy, receives insolation directly from the sun, and radiates directly into space. The impression I get from the article is that the newsworthy idea here is that those two locations might not need to be directly connected. This would permit what looks like a perpetual motion machine. But overall the 2nd law would still hold because entropy is increasing somewhere. Note: I'm not a physicist so don't take my word for this. Just conveying what I think I read.