THERMODYNAMICS AND RELATIVITY: DEAD SCIENCES

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vuW6tQ0218
"Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now."

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
"From this anthology it emerges that although many prominent physicists are firmly convinced of, and express admiration for the Second Law, there are also serious complaints, especially from mathematicians, about a lack of clarity and rigour in its formulation. At the very least one can say that the Second Law suffers from an image problem: its alleged eminence and venerability is not perceived by everyone who has been exposed to it. What is it that makes this physical law so obstreperous that every attempt at a clear formulation seems to have failed? Is it just the usual sloppiness of physicists? Or is there a deeper problem? And what exactly is the connection with the arrow of time and irreversibility? Could it be that this is also just based on bluff? Perhaps readers will shrug their shoulders over these questions. Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem we should turn to more recent, statistical theories. But even then the questions we are about to study have more than a purely historical importance. The problem of reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an adapted version, remains one of the toughest, and controversial problems in statistical physics. (...) This summary leads to the question whether it is fruitful to see irreversibility or time-asymmetry as the essence of the second law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the unargued statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion about the arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the thermodynamics is actually a RED HERRING."

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1201/1201.4133.pdf
"The concept of entropy introduced by R. Clausius, which is intimately associated with the second law, resembles the entropy featuring in the theory of probability only by perception. It does not have the extent of generality in description of natural phenomena the thermodynamics claims. C. Truesdell wrote in this connection: "Seven times in the past thirty years have a tried to follow the argument Clausius offers to conclude that the integrating factor T exists in general, is a function of temperature alone, and is the same for all bodies, and seven times has it blanked and graveled me... I cannot even explain what I cannot understand." The character itself of formulating the theory of thermal processes, which originates in the works of the founders of thermodynamics and is still persisting up to the present days, gave grounds to C. Truesdell to call thermodynamics "the dismal swamp of obscurity"."

ftp://ftp.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/SI...orts/06-46.pdf
"From the pedagogical point of view, thermodynamics is a disaster. As the authors rightly state in the introduction, many aspects are "riddled with inconsistencies". They quote V.I. Arnold, who concedes that "every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand an elementary course in thermodynamics". Nobody has eulogized this confusion more colorfully than the late Clifford Truesdell. On page 6 of his book "The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics" 1822-1854 (Springer Verlag, 1980), he calls thermodynamics "a dismal swamp of obscurity". Elsewhere, in despair of trying to make sense of the writings of some local heros as De Groot, Mazur, Casimir, and Prigogine, Truesdell suspects that there is "something rotten in the (thermodynamic) state of the Low Countries" (see page 134 of Rational Thermodynamics, McGraw-Hill, 1969)."

Pentcho Valev

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://arxiv.org/abs/1204.6688
"Graphene can collect energy from the ambient heat and convert it to electricity, which makes it an ideal candidate for the fabrication of self-powered devices. However, this technology is suffering the high cost, which limits the practical use of it. In this work, we demonstrated that the cost can be reduced by using low cost reduced graphene oxide (RGO), graphite electrodes and low cost glass substrates. The results showed that this technology can be of practical value for the "battery" industry."

Fifty years ago such a challenge to the second law of thermodynamics would have concerned primarily theoreticians and philosophers of physics (they would have gone mad with excitement) and to a lesser extent technologists. Nowadays theoreticians couldn't care less while philosophers of physics seem to have disappeared (almost no activity in the last two years or so).

Pentcho Valev