5 ms·
> 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 questi
by 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.