Frank Wilczek's Perpetual Motion

Violations of the second law of thermodynamics would be regarded as commonplace if it were not for misleading education:

http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/py105/Heatengines.html
"A necessary component of a heat engine, then, is that two temperatures are involved. At one stage the system is heated, at another it is cooled."

This is simply not true. There are heat engines functioning in isothermal conditions - e.g. the work-producing force is activated by some chemical agent, not by heating. For instance, there are macroscopic contractile polymers which, on adding acid (H+) to the system, develop a huge work-producing force, contract and lift a weight:

http://www.gsjournal.net/old/valev/val3.gif

http://www.google.com/patents/US5520672
"When the pH is lowered (that is, on raising the chemical potential, μ, of the protons present) at the isothermal condition of 37°C, these matrices can exert forces, f, sufficient to lift weights that are a thousand times their dry weight."

See Figure 4 he

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...00645-0017.pdf
A. KATCHALSKY, POLYELECTROLYTES AND THEIR BIOLOGICAL INTERACTIONS, p. 15, Figure 4: "Polyacid gel in sodium hydroxide solution: expanded. Polyacid gel in acid solution: contracted; weight is lifted."

Mineral acid (hydrogen ions, H+) is added to the system and "the polymolecule contracts and lifts the attached weight through a distance ΔL". Then the acid can be removed and the macromolecule resumes its initial stretched state, ready to lift another weight. The work involved in adding and removing (electrochemically) hydrogen ions, if performed reversibly, is virtually zero, while the net work extracted from contracting and stretching is obviously positive - the system is cyclically lifting weights at the expense of heat absorbed from the surroundings, in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

There are also macroscopic polymers which contract and lift a weight as H+ is removed, not added:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGn2a21FvLM
"Here we see a pH-responsive polyacrylic acid hydrogel contained within an unbound carbon fibre braid. The artificial muscle (McKibben style) actuates when placed in a solution with high pH..."

Pentcho Valev