Comments on My Outsourced Brain: Can the Second Law of Themodynamics Be Violated?

Let me start by saying nice post. Im not sure if i...

2010-04-09T19:41:29.809+02:00

Let me start by saying nice post. Im not sure if it has been talked about, but when using Chrome I can never get the entire site to load without refreshing many times. Could just be my computer. Thanks

nice post friends, I can imagine and understand ab...

2010-04-08T20:28:36.716+02:00

nice post friends, I can imagine and understand about law of themodynamics

Very nice analysis, I think this can solve my home...

2010-02-24T17:57:59.269+01:00

Very nice analysis, I think this can solve my homework problem. Thanks a lot :)

Thank you, @Oriol, for your insightful comment, it...

2009-12-11T18:42:30.097+01:00

Thank you, @Oriol, for your insightful comment, it seems that you know a lot about the second law. Have you ever tried to violate it?

@Gec: as Oriol said, energy cannot be created or destroyed only transformed. Even if it seems confusing to think about the age of the universe, the estimations about it are done assuming the conservation of energy. Of course, if some unknown "source" of energy would exist, the universe could be even older.

@Gec, the energy must be conserved. When you burn ...

2009-12-11T17:34:29.334+01:00

@Gec, the energy must be conserved. When you burn fuel or when you generate a nuclear reaction you don't make energy. You just transform one "type" of energy to another "type". For instance, when you burn fuel, you take the energy stored in a molecule and transform it to useful work: move a car.
Probably, we don't know all the ways to obtain the energy stored in molecules, atoms, or other particles (or another "thing") that maybe we still don't know. But we know that the sum of all this energy must be conserved. The second law only states that the energy flux have a direction: from one "type" (useful energy) to another "type" (not useful energy).
Why did you say that the universe would have reached the maximum of entropy? This depends on the velocity of the flux of energy. A fly with a life of some days, when it looks a tree (with a life of hundreds of years), cannot say that the tree is inmortal because, if not, it would have died before.

I'm not saying that the heat can be re-convert...

2009-12-09T18:06:23.062+01:00

I'm not saying that the heat can be re-converted into free energy. What I'm saying is that the Universe has other ways to generate entropy, energy etc - we are yet to find these ways though. If it didn't, it would have frozen already.

@Gec your idea would mean that some day we could l...

2009-12-05T14:29:58.852+01:00

@Gec your idea would mean that some day we could learn how to re-convert heat into free energy, violating the second law. But the accepted idea is that the second law holds. Even if the Universe is very old, it will take much time to convert all energy into non-free energy. One of the most famous quotes from Carl Sagan is: We are all star stuff.

Well, I beg to differ :) My take on this is: if t...

2009-12-02T18:38:57.429+01:00

Well, I beg to differ :)

My take on this is: if the Universe _could_ reach this max entropy thingy as you say, it _would_have_done_so_ already long time ago. The Universe is very old, you know. My guess is that it has its own ways to generate new entropy, we just don't know how it does it yet.

Cheers!

Hi Gec, Thanks for your interesting question. I&#...

2009-11-29T22:10:41.491+01:00

Hi Gec,
Thanks for your interesting question. I'm not familiar with the physics of the photosynthesis but what the second law states is that in order to do the "trick" you must spent more energy than the energy you gain. I suppose plants get the necessary energy from the sun.

Regarding your comment at the end, I suppose you are talking about the heat death of the Universe. If the entropy of the Universe is always increasing and the heat cannot be completely converted to work, there will be a moment when no thermodynamic free energy (in thermodynamics free energy means energy that can be converted to work) will be available. This means that the universe will have reached its maximum entropy. If you are interested, you can read the article in Wikipedia. But don't worry, there are millions of years left before this will happen! I would be more worried about the time when the sun stops producing energy.

Well, this article is quite long and I may have mi...

2009-11-29T19:01:34.673+01:00

Well, this article is quite long and I may have misunderstood some of the concepts, but: isn't the leaf, in its wisdom, doing the kerosene trick?

It takes the CO2 from the air and converts it back to "fuel" that you can later burn again and get the CO2 from which through photosynthesis the leaf steals the carbon and you get the oxygen and then again you burn it and so on.

And besides I thought the second law of thermodynamics stated that we'll all freeze in the near future :)

I'm not sure about this.. but anything is poss...

2009-11-29T15:33:56.243+01:00

I'm not sure about this.. but anything is possible, thank you for sharing your thoughts