Catalysts Topple the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Heat engines capable of violating the second law of thermodynamics are COMMONPLACE. This would be an obvious fact if misleading education had not diverted the attention from relevant examples:

"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." http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/py105/Heatengines.html

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.

All isothermal heat engines, except for analogs of ideal gas systems, can violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Just an example. By regularly changing the pH of the system, the experimentalist is able to extract unlimited amount of work from pH-sensitive polymers:

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/...se-network.png

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

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."

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."

The second law of thermodynamics is violated unless the following is the case:

The experimentalist, as he decreases and then increases the pH of the system, does (loses; wastes) more work than the work he gains from weight-lifting.

However electrochemists know that, if both adding hydrogen ions to the system and then removing them are performed quasi-statically, the net work involved is virtually zero (the experimentalist gains work if the hydrogen ions are transported from a high to a low concentration and then loses the same amount of work in the backward transport).

Pentcho Valev