In reply to Stephen A. Lawrence's message of Fri, 27 May 2005 12:52:06 -0400: Hi, [snip] >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. [snip] Any electrical diode will violate the second law. Take a source of electrical noise that derives it's energy from thermal energy of the environment. Send the current through a couple of transformers that increase the voltage to about 10 V. Put a diode and capacitor in the output of the last transformer, and you have a (very small) source of DC current at about 10 V. The noise source will cool it's environment till it reaches absolute zero. The electrical noise will be random in nature, but the diode "creates order out of chaos" by converting the complex AC into DC.
Actually all of this may already exist in simplified form in a solar cell. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk All SPAM goes in the trash unread.
