Violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

http://www.asminternational.org/web/.../CHAPTER-EVENT
Daniel Sheehan: "The second law of thermodynamics is considered by most engineers and scientists to be the supreme law of Nature, unbreakable even in principle. Over the last 20 years, however, a silent revolution has begun in the thermodynamics community that has pierced its veil of inviolability.. More than two dozen challenges have been advanced into the refereed scientific literature, and experiments now call into question its absolute status. This talk will discuss the history of paradigm in science and the current state of the second law in both theory and experiment. It is shown this century will likely see the second law contravened and, with it, the emergence of radically new energy technologies and the overturning of the current energy economy."

The second law of thermodynamics is false and yet one should not expect "the emergence of radically new energy technologies". For two reasons:

1. An isothermal heat engine (perpetual motion machine of the second kind) is extremely slow - the rate of work production is incompatible with any human activity which relies on energy supply.

2. As the example below shows, isothermal heat engines could be rather unstable and difficult to deal with, for reasons that have nothing to do with the second law of thermodynamics.

Here is a description of a simple isothermal heat engine:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...00645-0017.pdf
POLYELECTROLYTES AND THEIR BIOLOGICAL INTERACTIONS, A. KATCHALSKY, pp. 13-15: "Let the polymolecule be a negatively charged polyacid in a stretched state and have a length L. Now let us add to the molecule a mineral acid to provide hydrogen ions to combine with the ionized carboxylate groups and transform them into undissociated carboxylic groups according to the reaction RCOO- + H+ = RCOOH. By means of this reaction, the electrostatic repulsion which kept the macromolecule in a highly stretched state vanishes and instead the Brownian motion and intramolecular attraction cause a coiling up of the polymeric chains. Upon coiling, the polymolecule contracts and lifts the attached weight through a distance ΔL. On lifting the weight, mechanical work f*ΔL was performed... (...) FIGURE 4: Polyacid gel in sodium hydroxide solution: expanded. Polyacid gel in acid solution: contracted; weight is lifted."

So the mineral acid is added to the system and "the polymolecule contracts and lifts the attached weight through a distance ΔL". Then the mineral 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) the mineral acid is roughly zero while the work involved in contracting and stretching the macromolecule is obviously positive (the second law is violated).

The problem with the second law of thermodynamics is psychological, not scientific. There are falsehoods (like the second law of thermodynamics and Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate) which in a sense define our civilization - it seems that you cannot remove them without destroying the civilization itself.

Pentcho Valev