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Author Topic: Defying the second law of thermodynamics
Mark Szlazak
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Member # 391

Icon 1 posted 04. January 2003 11:43      Profile for Mark Szlazak   Email Mark Szlazak   Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
An FYI that may interested some and has been a topic in previous threads.

"The second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy or disorder of an isolated system undergoing a cyclic process will increase or remain the same. In July, however, Australian researchers showed that entropy can decrease over short time periods for small systems. This is the first time that a deviation from the second law has been demonstrated experimentally.

The researchers state that the discovery could be important in the design of micromachines, and argue that the probability of thermodynamic systems running 'in reverse' will increase as they become smaller. This could have important consequences for nanotechnology and could even give researchers an insight into how life itself functions."

Small systems defy second law
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Frances
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Icon 1 posted 04. January 2003 21:13      Profile for Frances     Send New Private Message       Edit/Delete Post 
Some comments were soon thereafter published:

Comment on Experimental Demonstration of Violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics for Small Systems and Short Time Scales

quote:
In a recent letter, Wang et al. [1] claimed that they experimentally demonstrate the violation of the second law of thermodynamics for a colloidal particle in an optical trap moving at a constant velocity. We show that their results cannot conclude the violation of the second law
since (i) the particle does not do the net work and (ii) what they observed are merely equilibrium position fluctuations of the particle. Also, the Nose-Hoover dynamics
is not necessary to explain their results.
Theory of the Transient and Stationary Fluctuation Theorems for a Dragged Brownian Particle in a Fluid

[ 04. January 2003, 21:30: Message edited by: Frances ]
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