I was thinking of a system that appears to take thermal energy and convert it into mechanical energy in a useful manner. The net effect is that the system cools down in response.
Suppose that a group of hot heads lives within a world that is at a very high temperature, so hot in fact that everything radiates visible light instead of the long wavelengths associated with our environment. I guess it would resemble the surface of the sun to produce our standard spectrum. These guys construct a photoelectric cell that takes some of the ever present light and converts it into DC voltage that is used to drive a motor. The motor is used to transport material from the surface of their world into a higher location thereby producing gravitational energy. Since light energy has been converted into mechanical work, less of it is present within the system so the world gets a bit cooler. There is little doubt that the overall energy is conserved, but it does not seem to require a low temperature heat sink for this engine to exhaust the high temperature heat into. It appears that the cold space surrounding a system can be used as the cool sink if another is not available. In principle this suggests that it should be possible to take any system that is above absolute zero temperature and extract heat from it which can be converted into another form of energy. For some reason, this seems to be getting a free lunch and I must be missing something. Support for this hypothesis is evident by observing the radiation of thermal energy from hot bodies into free space. The body cools down as it loses energy as would be expected, but perhaps there are other ways to cool it down besides radiation as the hot heads discovered. The process I proposed is very much like the conversion of gravitational energy of a gas into heat as the cloud collapses; only in reverse. Is this assumption wrong? Dave
