Jones, I believe that most physicists would bet against the idea that wave-function collapse, or equivalently, quantum measurements could increase energy concentration on a macroscopic scale - unless there is a compensatory entropy increase somewhere else.
So, it may be that some internal quantum coherence must exist, and must be destroyed during heat release. Here are a few papers that may be relevant - "Concentrating Energy by Measurement" http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.5868 "Ratcheting up energy by means of measurement" http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0611163 "Composite quantum systems and environment-induced heating" http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1551 "Extracting work from a single heat bath via vanishing quantum coherence" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12511655 "Quantum Measurement Information as a key to Energy Release from Local Vacuums" http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.2272 Jones Beene wrote: > This is the title of a provocative piece on quantum mechanics written by > Dr. > Dave on the "Ask a Physicist" series. > > The article is fairly lightweight but the conclusion is valid: Physicists > have no idea how the wave function collapses ... cough, cough ... but they > suspect it happens on a very short time interval, so that it is not easy > to document even with state of the art instruments. > [...]
