Australian physicists violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Say what?

[Wonk]

By Dr David Whitehouse
BBC News Online science editor

One of the most important principles of physics, that disorder, or entropy, always increases, has been shown to be untrue.

Scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) have carried out an experiment involving lasers and microscopic beads that disobeys the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics, something many scientists had considered impossible.

(snip)

The law of entropy, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, is one of the bedrocks on which modern theoretical physics is based. It is one of a handful of laws about which physicists feel most certain.

(snip)

Essentially, the smaller a machine is, the greater the chance that it will run backwards. It could be extremely difficult to control.

more...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2135779.stm

:shrug:

[rucky]

1. I never studied Law...

but I'm pretty sure you can do some serious time for that.

[punpirate]

2. Like cold fusion...

... wait for replication of the test....

Cheers.

[lazarus]

3. It's published

In "Physical Review Letters". Is that a peer review journal?

Like you, I'll wait for replication on this one.

[punpirate]

4. Not sure if the PRL...

... is refereed. It's part of the APS, but it might only be a notification service for the announcement of papers. Were that paper to be considered for publication in APS, it might then be subject to more scrutiny. Not sure.

Cheers.

[lazarus]

6. Okay

It's refereed to some extent. Here's a relevant bit:

Mission of the Journal
Physical Review Letters, published by the American Physical Society, is charged with providing rapid publication of short reports of important fundamental research in all fields of physics. The journal should provide its diverse readership with coverage of major advances in all aspects of physics and of developments with significant consequences across subdisciplines. Letters should therefore be of broad interest.

Acceptance Criteria
Physical Review Letters publishes Letters of not more than four journal pages and Comments of not more than one journal page. A Letter must meet specific standards for substance and presentation, as judged by rigorous refereeing and editorial review.
Substance: The paper must satisfy criteria of validity, importance, and broad interest. The work must be sound, free of detectable error, and presented in reasonable detail. The results must be new and not simply a marginal extension of previously published work. Papers of broad interest are those that report a substantial advance in a field of physics or have significant implications across subfield boundaries. In summary, Physical Review Letters publishes papers that keep broadly interested physicists well informed on vital current research.

Papers advancing new theoretical views on fundamental principles or theories must contain convincing arguments that the new predictions and interpretations are distinguishable from existing knowledge, at least in principle, and do not contradict estabilished experimental results. Mathematical and computational papers that do not have application to physics are generally not suitable for Physical Review Letters.

Papers that describe proposed experiments fall into a special category. For such papers to be acceptable, the experiments must be demonstrated to be novel and feasible. It is the authors' responsibility to show that their proposal is likely to stimulate research that might not otherwise be undertaken.


http://prl.aps.org/info/polprocl.html

[xchrom]

5. what's the jail time for that?

who's their lawyer?

[HereSince1628]

7. Well, shooting from the hip...

Doesn't the energy story of the system have to be considered?

Putting things into order is COMMON. I do it all the time with my laundry. But as I do the work to generate the order I generate heat which is a less useful form of energy compared to the chemical energy that was available to my muscle cells.

Spontaneous ordering of beads is weird, but it seems like it took work to do it. I am biased to think that the 2nd law was obeyed via the behavior of the energy component of the system.

[MrPrax]

14. Good point...

One Law like the Second Law might appear to be violated, but the Law of Conservation seems to be in tact.

[htuttle]

8. I've heard it argued that...

...Life, taken as whole, is a 'anentropic' process, in that it takes diffused, fairly entropic energy in the form of sunlight, and ultimately converts it into sugars (and then proteins, organs, organisms, and finally all the way up to CD-ROM players and Pez dispensers).

When looked at from orbit, the biosphere is fairly anti-entropic. While each individual life form is affected by entropy throughout it's existence, the planet's biosphere as a whole has tended toward more complexity and more order (compared to the pre-life primordial soup).

Just a thought -- there may be other exceptions to the Chilling Grasp of Entropy.

[HereSince1628]

16. A.J. Lotka did an interesting mathematical treatise on biological

phenomena back in the 19-teens. He dealth with the issue of life with respect to the fact that ordering molecules is a key element of life. He referred to this building of biomass as accumulation and life forms themselves as accumulators...intereting work, but again organizing is something based on WORK. There is no violation of ANY physical law.

Buying into life as a violation of physical law takes you immediately into the realm of thinking occupied by Gish and the Creation Science Institute and other psuedo-science wackos.

[EnviroRational]

9. This reminds me of a Simpson's episode.

Ok - Considering this is my first post on the forum, I should probably come up with something of more substance. But...

This reminds me of an episode of the Simpson's where Marge tells Homer that Lisa has made this machine that just keeps going faster and faster. Homer yells for Lisa, and when she comes into the room, Homer tells her "Young Lady, In this house we obey the laws of themodynamics."

Ok - please continue.

[glitch]

11. thanks for the chuckle

welcome to DU!

[Kolesar]

12. nerd humor

I love it.

[enki23]

10. never heard *that* one before.

maybe they powered the whole process with zero-point energy, or maybe cold fusion?

[midnight armadillo]

13. A key point

The researchers discovered that in such a tiny system, entropy can sometimes decrease rather than increase.

The key word is sometimes. Thermodynamics deals with ensembles of entities in a system, and is best understood as a set of laws of average behavior. So, on small length and time scales thermodynamics can sometimes be violated for a little while.

The point is that you shouldn't design your nanotechnology widgets with the assumption that they'll act just like their bigger counterparts, but this is hardly a new point. They've just provided further evidence in this from a different angle.

Incidentally, PRL is a great journal to be published in.

[bobthedrummer]

15. There used to be a law of hydraulics

that stated that liquids will not compress until some folks in the UK compressed liquids.

Beware when you state that something is impossible and deride the messenger as ignorant or mentally ill or whatever {as has been going on here at DU a lot lately}.

[papau]

17. Mental masturbation of Gen Relativilty/Newton results as average of QM ?

This seems to be the in thing these days - and always has been during my lifetime. But what is being "proven" these days that is new?

Loop QM Gravity is said to give Gen Relativity answers as averages - but no math is shown. And if speed is in excess in small system, that does not mean time flows backward in small systems?

And In this 2nd law case the system is defined as very small.

I am getting too old for this stuff. One would thing that the range above the "speed of light" would still be observed in loop theory, and that a sum of small systems entropy decreasing would be a large system entropy decreasing.

As someone noted - "work" to get local entropy decreased is no big deal. So what is going on that the writer of the verison I can still read - the "popular" version - is not getting across and into my thick skull?