Scientists Don't See Violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

"Clean, Unlimited Energy. Physicists at the University of Arkansas have invented a nano-scale power generator that could potentially use the movement of graphene to produce clean, unlimited energy. Called a Vibration Energy Harvester, this development provides evidence for the theory that two-dimensional materials could be a source of usable energy. [...] The team determined that the movements were due to ambient heat at room temperature." https://futurism.com/potential-clean-unlimited-energy/

The second law of thermodynamics is not even mentioned. Post-truth science obeys both Loyola's principle and Orwell's crimestop:

Ignatius of Loyola: "That we may be altogether of the same mind and in conformity with the Church herself, if she shall have defined anything to be black which appears to our eyes to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black."

"Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity." http://ebooks..adelaide.edu.au/o/orw...hapter2.9.html

Pentcho Valev

Here is a spectacular illustration of perpetual (limited only by the deterioration of the system) motion of water in an electric field:

"The Formation of the Floating Water Bridge including electric breakdowns" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17UD1goTFhQ

The system is obviously able to produce work - e.g. by rotating a waterwheel - and this work will be done at the expense of ambient heat, in violation of the second law of thermodynamics (no other reasonable source of energy is conceivable).

Here the crimestop is absolute. The energy powering the perpetual motion is never discussed. The only exception is in the quotation below. Some "stored energy" is hinted at - it was "inaccessible" and is now "liberated":

"The water movement is bidirectional, i.e., it simultaneously flows in both directions... [...] There is practically nothing ordinary about the water in an active floating bridge, and this is no esoteric experiment, as the strength and shape of the electric field we apply in the water bridge is nearly ubiquitous throughout nature. It turns out that if we examine the electric fields present in nature, such as those in living cells, around soil particles, or in clouds, we find that the field strengths are on the same order of magnitude - megavolts per meter. Which incidentally is the same in the water bridge, not to mention inside many electrochemical and biochemical fuel cells that are now being used to develop the next generation of resource recovery technologies. Megavolts per meter seems to be this kind of universal constant of field strength in aqueous systems. It's such an enticing observation that, during my defense, one of my opponents made a point to ask whether I thought this was just a coincidence or indicated some deeper truth that we are as yet unaware. Of course I had to answer the latter, as I am a firm believer that nature is quite deliberate in its construction and there are really no accidents. [...] The floating water bridge is a long-lost piece of the puzzle in understanding why water is such an unusual substance. What we had missed was that, in liquids there exists an intrinsic disequilibrium which continuously drives the system around within a big basin of possible configurations; and water is again exceptional. When we apply the electric field, we perturb the dynamics and change the shape of the attractor basin. This in turn changes the flow of energy through the system and may even liberate stored energy that is inaccessible when the liquid is in the ground state." https://www.wetsus.nl/home/wetsus-ne...n-innovation/1

Actually there is no "stored energy" - the engine is powered by AMBIENT HEAT. We have a fundamental mechanism of utilization of ambient heat (no need for a temperature gradient) that has remained hidden for too long, thanks to the inclination of mankind to blind itself by imposing false restrictive principles - in this case the second law of thermodynamics. In an electric field, water is capable of undergoing perpetual (limited only by the deterioration of the system) motion and the energy source behind this is heat absorbed from the surroundings. The absorbed heat eventually returns to the surroundings, due to friction. However the perpetual motion can be harnessed - then heat absorbed from the surroundings will be converted into work, in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

The same perpetual motion can be seen here - note the vigorous agitation between the plates of the capacitor:

"Liquid Dielectric Capacitor" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6KAH1JpdPg

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..Scientists didn’t see even this:

Natu "Second law broken. Researchers have shown for the first time that, on the level of thousands of atoms and molecules, fleeting energy increases violate the second law of thermodynamics. [...] They found that over periods of time less than two seconds, variations in the random thermal motion of water molecules occasionally gave individual beads a kick. This increased the beads' kinetic energy by a small but significant amount, in apparent violation of the second law." http://www.nature.com/news/2002/0207...s020722-2.html

Scientific American: "Second Law of Thermodynamics Violated. [...] ...the water molecules interacted with the bead in such a way that energy was transferred from the liquid to the bead. These additional kicks used the random thermal motion of the water to do the work of moving the bead, in effect yielding something for nothing. For periods of movement lasting less than two seconds, the bead was almost as likely to gain energy from the water as it was to add energy to the reservoir, the investigators say." https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...f-thermodynam/

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There was a sensation in 2012 - researchers had described a graphene-based device converting ambient heat into electricity, in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Yet only the technological aspects were discussed - the violation of the second law was not mentioned in the original paper and the comments (not even in Nature's comment):

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/4...ctric-current/
"Graphene Battery Turns Ambient Heat Into Electric Current. Physicists have built a graphene battery that harvests energy from the thermal movement of ions in solution."

http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.0161
Self-Charged Graphene Battery Harvests Electricity from Thermal Energy of the Environment, Zihan Xu et al: "Moreover, the thermal velocity of ions can be maintained by the external environment, which means it is unlimited. However, little study has been reported on converting the ionic thermal energy into electricity. Here we present a graphene device with asymmetric electrodes configuration to capture such ionic thermal energy and convert it into electricity. [...] To exclude the possibility of chemical reaction, we performed control experiments... [...] In conclusion, we could not find any evidences that support the opinion that the induced voltage came from chemical reaction. The mechanism for electricity generation by graphene in solution is a pure physical process..."

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/03...y-device..html
Natu "Although materials scientist Yury Gogotsi of Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, doubts the latest claim, he points out that the mystery should at least be relatively easy to clear up. "The device described by Xu's group is very simple and numerous labs can easily repeat this experiment to check the validity of the results," he says. [...] Comments are closed."

Comments were really closed in 2012, and the promise that "numerous labs can easily repeat this experiment to check the validity of the results" was immediately forgotten.

In 2013 Zihan Xu and co published a similar paper, in a prestigious journal, and this time the violation of the second law WAS mentioned. That was fatal. Scientists do discuss violations in microscopic or nanosystems but a macroscopic violation of the second law of thermodynamics acts like the face of Medusa the Gorgon - on seeing it, scientists get petrified and never recover. So the second paper did not become a sensation - there were no comments at all:

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip...1063/1.4825269
Electricity generated from ambient heat across a silicon surface, Guoan Tai, Zihan Xu, and Jinsong Liu, Appl. Phys. Lett. 103, 163902 (2013): "We report generation of electricity from the limitless thermal motion of ions across a two-dimensional (2D) silicon (Si) surface at room temperature. [...] ....limitless ambient heat, which is universally present in the form of kinetic energy from molecular, particle, and ion sources, has not yet been reported to generate electricity. [...] This study provides insights into the development of self-charging technologies to harvest energy from ambient heat, and the power output is comparable to several environmental energy harvesting techniques such as ZnO nanogenerator, liquid and gas flow-induced electricity generation across carbon nanotube thin films and graphene, although this remains a challenge to the second law of thermodynamics..."

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