If true, then it's free energy (though somewhat hard to scale). (But it
sounds a lot like Maxwell's daemon electrified, and figuring out why
Maxwell's daemon doesn't work always seems to involve arguments I can't
quite follow with proofs that don't fit in the margin...)
Robin van Spaandonk wrote:
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.
Can you give an example of such a source?
I immediately thought of shot noise from a resistor, but then realized a
resistor does its thing when you've already got a current flowing
through it. IOW its behavior is more like a noisy resistor than a noisy
voltage source (not too surprising, I guess!). So rectifying shot noise
isn't likely to get you free energy.
Is there an example of a noise source with which this actually can be
made to work?
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
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