3 ms·
When it was unusually hot over here, I was thinking about this. We can convert nearly every kind of energy into electricity and back. But for heat, for some biz
by grishka 5y ago
When it was unusually hot over here, I was thinking about this. We can convert nearly every kind of energy into electricity and back. But for heat, for some bizarre reason, this only works one way. A lot of processes generate it, but you literally can't convert it into any other form of energy. You have to transfer it somewhere where it won't be as much of a problem.
It would be very nice to have an AC where you don't need to deal with that. I thought about many ways to get rid of heat without having to dump it somewhere, but thermodynamics is such a terrible thing.
- wiredfool 5y agoThermodynamics -- you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't even leave the game.
- blueblisters 5y ago> I thought about many ways to get rid of heat without having to dump it somewhere, but thermodynamics is such a terrible thing. This is likely a stupid question but temperature is a statistical property describing the energy of molecules right? Is there no way to tap the energy of the molecules for useful work without having a temperature difference?
- davidinosauro 5y agoYou might want to read about Maxwell's daemon [1]. I came across this a few weeks back, two links away from the HN homepage. I found it intreaguing and read more about it but I can't quite umderstand the proposed solutions, likely due to my lack of background in thermodynamics. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demon
- blueblisters 5y agoClearly, Maxwell was much better (and funnier) in articulating what I was asking. Looks Maxwell's demon can work some of the time at a molecular level, but on average, you need to do work to extract useful heat from matter at a macroscopic level. The hypothesis being that you need to do work just to identify hot/energetic molecules from the cold/low-energy molecules.