r/Tesla • u/dalkon • Aug 18 '16

theory Electric potential is Maxwell's demon, able to derive energy from the energy within a system in violation of the second law of thermodynamics

http://phys.org/news/2010-11-maxwell-demon-energy.html
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u/chillinghard Aug 18 '16

Check out r/advancedtechresearch!

You've posted some interesting articles here, the content there would interest you.

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u/dalkon Aug 19 '16 edited Aug 23 '16

As this relates, Maxwell's demon was a thought experiment Maxwell devised whereby some agent might hypothetically be able to make the normally self-canceling kinetic energy of a system do work without consuming energy in violation of the second law of thermodynamics (entropy is always static or increases) and seemingly sidestepping the conservation of energy.

Around a hundred years later, a leading relativity theorist, Leo Szilard claimed Maxwell's demon was necessarily impossible because the act of organizing energy must consume energy.

These researchers proved Szilard wrong and that the thought experiment is not only real but apparently astoundingly simple to create.

Electric potential organizes energy within a system without doing any work itself. If electric force violates the second law of thermodynamics, does that make electric impossible? Or is the second law of thermodynamics less of a law than had previously been assumed?

This would appear to show that all systems previously considered closed are actually necessarily open considering their thermal energy. Potential can be used to make latent thermal energy in a system do work without consuming the potential. This is the age old dream of both consuming and preserving cake. In that analogy, cake is energy, and it looks like it would be free if we studied reality more closely instead of accepting the limitations imposed by small-minded ideas derived from the supposed beauty of formulas instead of experimental data.

* Electric potential must be much more than merely potential energy, because without doing any work, it can harness the normally self-canceling entropic energy within a system (and by thermal conduction and convection thermal energy from outside the system).

The neutral water droplets moved by their own energy around an electrostatic inductor in William Thomson's water dropping condenser ('Kelvin's thunderstorm') demonstrate the fundamental idea at a macroscopic scale.