Harry Veeder wrote:
Jones Beene wrote:
Actually I am hoping for a local player to step in at the last
second with the self-powered unit, but it could also be Moller or
Mills or Storms or Shoulders or Tessien instead. The 2nd Law will
crumble soon. IMHO the big prize for breaking the law (2nd Law)
and throwing physics into the disarray it rightly deserves for
ingrained pig-headedness - will go for the device itself, and not
the underlying theory, which may take a generation to flesh out.
Let me repeat one thing - massive heat OU is NOT going to be
enough - you must demonstrate a self-powered unit to remove all
doubt.
If such a device existed, how could one decide if its performance was a
result of violating the first law rather than the second law?
Put the whole thing in a big box, and measure the temperature of
everything and the total internal energy of everything in the box, to
determine exactly how much energy is present.
Let it run for a while.
Repeat the measurements. (Granted, this is a gedanken experiment --
really _doing_ this would be very hard.)
The first law says that if the box is sealed, you always get the same
number (I think!).
The second law says you can't cool off the box by converting the heat
energy into mechanical energy, so its violations are harder to detect --
you need to look at how the energy is distributed inside the box because
other effects (non-violations) can change the temperature of the system
as a whole.
If I understand the concept of ZPE correctly, it's a violation of the
first law, not the second law, because it adds energy to the system
without an apparent source. It doesn't just involve converting heat
energy into something more useful.
And as Jones points out thermo still stands if ZPE violates the first
law; we just need to enlarge the system adequately to include a place
which lost energy while we were gaining it. Violating the second law
would actually be more serious, I think; it's not clear how you'd fix
thermodynamics to deal with a second law violation.
