Stephen A. Lawrence wrote: > > > 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. >
I guess there is no way to refute the first law as it can always be saved. So in sense it is irrelevant to science, although it remains relevant to engineering. Harry
