All language subtitles for Energy From The Vacuum 08 - Challenging the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics - Tom Bearden John Bedini.ia

-One of the things that they're interested in doing as opposed to what you might have thought about, what I might have thought about the Catholic Church

-is that they're very open to looking at ideas that are that are outside the mainstream,

-and they're not stuck in, at least in the sciences, they're not stuck in these dogmatic views, for example, of the availability of the second law.

-I don't know what they're like on on the religious studies side.

No, I think it's the same way.

I mean, they want people to examine their inner lives and to look at the world in total humanistically, holistically.

And so you can talk about anything you want, pretty much

more so than at a big university where you offend somebody and then they'll go clamp you.

So there's more academic freedom here, in my opinion, than you do you have in a public university.

-Well, we certainly couldn't be doing this work.

No, this is a very unusual time and place.

We have a big enough university to have support, a small enough university to allow academic freedom.

I would have been fired for this. You see

+What is the thermodynamics?

Is the science of how heat work and matter interact, basically.

How does he get converted into into work?

How does work at converted into heat?

What is his effect on that

thermodynamics if you take it apart,

you have thermo, which invokes the idea of heat.

Dynamics, which invokes the idea of mechanical objects of some sort.

So if you put them together, thermodynamics indicates

you're looking at how heat and mechanical objects or physical objects interact along with work.

So it's the study of work, heat and regular matter.

And the laws that govern them are called the laws of thermodynamics, and there are four of them.

The zeroth law is basically a statement that you can have a thermometer, you can measure temperature or determine what equilibrium is.

First law, conservation of energy.

Second, law is a statement that can be stated in various ways,

one of which is that the entropy or disorder in any physical process or the entropy of the universe increases for any spontaneous physical process.

The third law is a way of finding of fiduciary entropy.

So the way it's stated oftentimes is that, for instance, the entropy of a perfect crystal, that absolute zero-zero,

which means that a perfectly organized zero temperature object in principle have zero entropy, is perfectly organized.

Any deviation, any rising in temperature or any movement away from the crystal in state will increase its disorder.

So it's the zeroth and third laws, the one dealing with thermometers and the one dealing with absolute values of entropy are definitional in a sense.

They're there to kind of bracket the two central laws, which are the first and second.

The first tells you that energy is conserved.

The second one says that the entropy of the universe never decreases.

So those are the real information content.

That's the real information content of the laws of thermodynamics.

"Clausius" stated it.

The energy developed is constant to entropy, stripe on a maximum ¿?.

Which means the energy of the universe is constant.

The entropy of the universe strives toward a maximum, and that pretty much summarizes thermodynamics.

Everything else follows from that in principle, but it gets a lot more complicated.

I mean, obviously the real world is a lot more complicated and shows more variation these four laws indicate.

But nonetheless, the laws of thermodynamics are considered by many to be among the most absolute laws in nature,

because they apply virtually to everything, anything with more than just a few particles.

Thermodynamics has something to say about it.

+Why?

Well, because when small particles interact, the they need to conserve energy or the entire system needs to conserve energy

that certainly is within the purview of thermodynamics.

And also since systems tend to explore the range of possibilities that are available to them,

they will tend to inhabit that region of possibility space, which maximizes their possibilities for existence,

which would indicate a striving toward maximum disorder or maximum possibility,

which is somewhat the essence of the second law.

So whenever you have more than a few particles interacting like gas molecules,

if you throw them in a box, they will tend to go to a maximum entropy state.

Rather than collecting, let's say, all on one corner where their order would be maximized, let's say.

So nature just tends to go toward maximum entropy states.

That's an experimental observation.

You can make arguments for it based on probability theory, but ultimately it's an experimental fact.

All laws of physics ultimately are contingent upon them being observed in nature.

You can't prove a physical law by the very nature of law is something that is axiomatic,

that cannot be proven, is something that is simply observed about the world.

And you can either, whether you agree or disagree with it, the observations of the world are what they are.

Theories you might be able to derive from more basic laws.

Or regular observations you might be able to explain in terms of your theories.

But when you get about the most fundamental things in science,

the laws of science, by their very nature cannot be proven otherwise they wouldn't be laws,

they'd be derivable from something more fundamental.

The laws of nature are not written on a wall anywhere.

They're not written on the on the particles of nature, the atoms or the molecules.

They are the invisible rules by which everything operates, apparently.

And we have to infer what they are from our observations.

They are they're human constructs about what the universe is doing.

+Give your definition of the second law, while we're talking

there is no definition of the second law.

There are probably between half a dozen and two dozen definitions, depending on how you want to count them.

Not all the statements of the second law are compatible with each other.

Some of them are more popular than others.

So I can I can give you maybe the first top few if you want to hear those.

It shouldn't really be called a law, should be called a principle in a sense or a meta law,

because it it has lots of different definitions and not everyone agrees with what they are.

Here's a statement by "Truesdell", who was one of the great historians and mathematicians of science.

He says "every physicist knows exactly what the first and second laws mean.

But it is my experience that no two physicists agree on them."

+Well, that's true.

That's generally the case.

But let me just kind of go through with ones that people consider the best and most important, one's called "Kelvin-Plank".

No device operating in a cycle can produce the sole effect of extraction of a quantity of heat from a heat reservoir and the performance of an equal quantity of work.

In other words, you can't take random thermal motion, you know, in steam or water or whatever it happens to be,

and rectify that into some sort of gross mechanical motion, into some coherent motion without somehow performing work to do that,

in which case you somehow have to have created entropy in that process, which compensates for any decrease in entropy

in organizing all those molecules in the first place.

+Do you agree that some ¿?

Sure, the laws of poker in hell, how about that?

The zeroth law, there exist poker in hell

first law, you can't win

second law, you can't break even.

The third law, you can't leave the game

+Put hell somewhere in the middle of the heat and rectification of energy and work.

Energy in the world is conserved, Energy in the universe is conserved.

But with any kind of process you carry out

There almost always be an inevitable tax on that energy

which comes in the form of degradation of that energy into a more impoverished form,

which you would call heat, something that's less usable.

That's a working man's definition of the second law.

The second law is a tax on the first law.

let's see if I can find, here's a simpler one.

There are no perfect refrigerators, perfectly efficient refrigerators.

There are no perfectly efficient heat engines.

there is no possible process for which the sole effect is that heat flows from a reservoir at a given temperature to a reservoir at a higher temperature.

In other words, heat tends to flow from hot to cold, but it will not spontaneously flow from cold to hot.

So when you have something like a cup of cold iced tea, you know, in a warm room, heat flows from the room into the iced tea and melts the ice.

But you're not going to have your glass of ice tea spontaneously freeze and cast its heat into the room.

That's not going to happen ever.

So all of this can be, if you look at these various definitions,

you can kind of convince yourself that what this amounts to is to say that

for any real natural process, the entropy change in the universe will never decrease.

It might not increase, but it will never decrease.

The entropy of the universe, the disorder will always tend to increase.

And if you're going to impose order on a system, you have to pay for it by creating more disorder somewhere else

than the amount of order that you established in the process.

that's why I say when you compare it to poker in hell, you say you can't win.

That's like saying you can't get something for nothing.

You can't win, which means you can't get free.

get energy out of your system or work out of your system for free.

That's the first of law.

The second, I would say you're not even going to keep the work that you had originally.

You're going to lose some of the energy Which would not be able to recover and use again.

That's why you say you can't break even, means you only can lose.

And the final statement having to do with the third law, which says that there's always entropy in any system that you can define.

That means you can't leave the game regardless of how you want to play the game.

Thermodynamics is going to apply to you and you're always going to lose in the end.

It's like going to Las Vegas.
If you play long enough, you're going to lose it all.

+ Can you talk about any of the things that have been observed, experiments or whatever in history

+ or recently that at any point in time that have been used to demonstrate this principle

The second law?
+Yeah.

okay i have a nice and neat stack of paper here.

I can throw the stack of paper into the air

and it is possible that it will all fly up in the air, flutter about and land in a perfect stack on the floor.

That's possible.
But "Tony" just laughed.

Why?
Because he knows it's not going to happen.

because he understands intuitively the second law, as does everybody.

But it is theoretically possible to do that.
And it can happen.

but what the second law says is that it's unlikely to happen.

So anything you do in your life

well, maybe with maybe one or two exceptions.

And those don't violate the second law.

But everything you do in your life increases the entropy of the universe.

Just the very act of living increases the entropy of the universe.

The only way to stop increasing the entropy of the universe is to shoot yourself and lie in your grave and decompose

When you're all done decomposing and reached equilibrium.
You're not increasing the entropy of the universe anymore.

And that's the only way to do it.
It's a no win situation.

you're always going to lose energy into heat,

which is why we keep eating in order to motivate our are coherent mechanical motions of our arms and legs and our minds and everything else.

We have to keep feeding ourselves with chemical energy and burning it with oxygen from the air.

And by constantly feeding ourselves, we can get work out of the system and out of our systems and do mechanical work.

But in the process we're generating all sorts of entropy.

We only have poorly been 20% efficient first because of the heat, maybe more than that.

But we're incredible entropy generators.

Life itself is the second law's greatest ally

because by the act of living, we're constantly driving cars, we're building nuclear bombs,

were burning fossil fuels, we're cleaning up our rooms.

Everything we do, everything about life generates entropy far more than the chemicals, the inert chemicals.

If we were to be decomposed into inert chemicals would do themselves.

When I was a kid, I used to argue with my mom about this because

it turns out that even when you clean up your room and turn it into what you consider an organized state,

you've had to use the vacuum cleaner, you've had to use broom, and you had to do a lot of work in order to clean it up.

The very act of cleaning up the room creates more entropy, more disorder on a universal level than if you just let the room in its messy state.

So I used to argue

So I said, Mom, look, if I don't organize my room, then I'm saving the world from a disorganized heat death.

She never bought it, but it's actually true.

If you really want to keep the world organized, don't do anything at all.

Entropy is a measure of disorder.

That's the common definition.

But actually, nobody really knows what entropy is either.

+I just thought I meant some sort of de-escalating into disorder.

That that's a process.
But entropy itself has various definitions.

the book here that I've written with "Nikulov" Has 21 different versions of entropy,

and there are probably another 30 which have been discovered as well

Entropy can be defined in fairly reasonable terms only for equilibrium systems, for non-equilibrium systems,

which is virtually any system of interest, because we're only interested in how things change and the dynamic nature of the universe.

Entropy cannot be well-defined for non-equilibrium processes.

No one knows how to do it.

+And what is a non-equilibrium process?

A non equilibrium process is one that is changing in time, basically.

Some non-equilibrium process is the process which causes the system to change as macroscopic characteristics like pressure and temperature.

It's like a ball rolling down a hill.

Once the ball's at the bottom of the hill and stops, that would be considered equilibrium.

But any time the ball's is rolling down the hill, or bouncing or anything, that would be considered a non-equilibrium process.

That's a poor description of it.

Equilibrium is a state where the macroscopic properties,

thermodynamic properties of a system like pressure and temperature are no longer changing.

Any time these things are spontaneously changing or being changed from the outside, then that's considered a non-equilibrium system.

It's a process of change.

The problem with talking about it this way is that the whole arrow of time and the second law are entwined with each other.

Why does time go forward?
Why does why did all these pieces of paper flutter to the ground?

how come they don't pick themselves up and come back into my hand in reverse?

Why don't they? The energy is there, but it doesn't happen.
There's a particular arrow of time.

there's a particular tendency of the universe to move from one level of entropy to a higher level of entropy.

And that, in a sense, defines the direction of time.

So it's sometimes difficult to define non-equilibrium without defining time.

But as soon as you start talking about time, you're almost implicitly implying the second law. So that gets confusing.

+So how does the second law relate to equilibrium?

The second law, I would say that systems tend toward an equilibrium state if given the chance.

that is a state toward maximum entropy.

+So what we call equilibrium implies a movement towards entropy?

An isolated system will tend to move toward a maximum equilibrium state.

And when it reaches a maximum equilibrium state from which it doesn't change any more apparently, that's called equilibrium.

So you can consider equilibrium to be the maximum equilibrium state of a system

in terms of working, in terms of the second law.

I mean, the last section of this books called "The Second Law Mystique", and I call it that because there's,

can I read a little bit?

Perhaps more has been written about the second law across the breadth of human knowledge and endeavor than about any other physical law.

Direct and indirect references to it can be found in all branches of science, engineering, economics, art, literature, psychology, philosophy, and the popular culture.

Quite aside from his profound physical, technological, social, philosophical and humanistic implications.

The second law is famous for being famous.

It has become the epitome of scientific truth, notorious for its absolute status, virtually unquestioned by the scientific community.

Much of its mystique can be traced to the in premature of scientists like "Einstein", "Plank", "Eddington", "Fermi", "Poincaré", "Clausius" and "Maxwell".

Their reputations are reciprocally burnished by association with this fundamental law.

Thus, a cycle of mystique is established.

The following are representative quotes from Sciences and Humanities dealing with the second law and his absolute status

outside of theater rarely does one find such melodrama.

"Eddington" was considered one of the great scientists of the early 20th century, right up there with "Einstein".

The law that entropy always increases.

The second law of thermodynamics holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature.

If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with "Maxwell's" equations

and so much the worse for "Maxwell's" equations, if it is found to be contradicted by observation.

Well, these experimentalists bungle things sometimes.

But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics, I can give you no hope.

There is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

"Einstein" wrote So the classical thermodynamics is the only theory of universal content concerning which I am convinced

that within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts will never be overthrown.

Now, when statements like this get popularized and these are probably the two most famous statements considering the second law

that goes around the second law, this mystique, which if you even question, you are pretty much thrown out or ostracized from science.

And so what we're fighting, as much as the difficulties of the experiment we're proposing,

is the second law Mystique, which is an invisible, self-imposed censorship that science has put upon itself about what it can speak about

it's worse than dogma because, well, you're right, it's dogma, but it's a dogma that has associated with it an extreme amount of ridicule,

which tends to dissuade people from even entering the subject.

Because one word that we have consciously avoided up to this point is the term perpetual motion machine.

+That's a lot.

There you go.

So we tend to avoid the perpetual motion machine.
Instead, you hide behind the word "Maxwell Demon".

"Maxwell Demon", of course, is legitimized by the great "James Clerk Maxwell".

But if you use perpetual motion machine, the ridicule that goes behind that can be traced all the way back to "Leonardo Da Vinci" in the 14th century.

15th, 16th century.

+If I were to get an argument with you about the second law

... The second law and they just insist that the second law's defined such and such and so and so

And anything else is, it cannot be in violation of that because there's no such thing as violating the second law.

What kind of argument? How would you paraphrase the argument?

Well, first of all, I say it's unscientific because you can't prove all that.

By the very nature you can't prove it, you can't verify it, you can over observe it over and over again.

But if you believe "Popper", for instance, and this is simply somewhat simplistic, but "Popper" would say

the only valid laws of nature are always intrinsically falsifiable,

which means that if you can't find, and if you can't at least come up with a well, how should I put it?

To claim that a law cannot be violated really doesn't make sense because the law is only a law if it has a possibility of being violated.

In other words, you have to have laws and observation about the world.

And it is true as long as it keeps being observed in the world,

as soon as it stops being observed in the world, or as soon as you find an exception,

then you can say that it is no longer a law and use some sort of modification.

+And you're talking a little bit about "Maxwell" and what he observed and what's his involvement

well, "Maxwell" was a theoretician primarily.

But in regard to the "Maxwell Demon", what "Maxwell" was trying to do was what he would say, pick a hole in the second law.

And the way he was trying to do that was to envision some sort of little creature, which was later called by,

"Kelvin" was the person that first named.

the "Maxwell Demon", which was a small creature which could, on an individual atomic basis, sort atoms either by sort one into one chamber,

sort of another one into another chamber, such as to create a, let's say, an artificial temperature difference between two chambers.

By creating a temperature difference, you can create a heat engine by which you can do work.

So this little creature essentially takes an equilibrium gas, one with maximum entropy all mixed up

and sorts it out into two kinds of particles,fast and slow particles,

and then uses the difference in their temperature or their energies to do work.

This would subvert the second law because you've taken an original high entropy equilibrium state

and turned it into a system whereby you can actually get more work out,

and that would be forbidden by the second law

you've taken disorganize state created more order by sorting the particles in and using that order to do work

+and lost nothing
and lost nothing.

so it relies on the sentients of your "Maxwell Demon",

and the demon himself has to be able to see the particles and then you can argue saying that he wouldn't be able to do that.

And under equilibrium configurations, you'd have to be able to think and be able to sort lots and lots of particles,

maybe a mole of particles 10 to the 23rd, something like that, which would be very difficult computationally.

On top of that, you'd have to store the information in order to do it and ultimately have to erase it.

And apparently the erasure of the information is the Achilles heel of the "Maxwell's Demon".

The process of erasure ultimately creates entropy, which offsets the entropy decrease that he created by sorting the gas.

So at least in my mind, it's fairly well settled.

And I think in the scientific community mind, it's basically settled that the sentient "Maxwell Demon" won't work.

On the other hand,

there are two dozen or more nonsentient "Maxwell Daemons", which have come to light in the last 10, 15 years,

which apparently have not been refuted by the scientific community and do possibly hold a chance

for violating the second law under certain extreme thermodynamic conditions.

And that's what colleagues of mine and I have been working on here at USD.

But also what about a half a dozen other research groups around the world have worked on

the one that we're proposing with and semiconductors is the only one that I'm aware of that is concrete,

experimentally viable, verifiable and can be done at room temperature.

That would have a very clean cut result.

The rest of them are more exotic.

Okay, to introduce this particular "Maxwell demon", take a piece of common aluminum foil

and bite on it with a metal fillings and you'll usually use found to be pretty unpleasant.

What happens is that you have electrons which can be transferred between the different metals,

between the aluminum and by the silver-mercury amalgam in the filling.

And as the electrons are transferred between the two metals and kind of even out between them,

this charge transfer amounts to a current which can be felt through the nerves in beneath the filling

and gives you a slight and unpleasant shock.

This demonstrates that when you bring two metals together, you get what's called a contact potential,

which is the potential difference between two different pieces of metal, 2 to 3 different kinds of metals as the "Fermi" levels, as they're called,

even out between the two metals as well as the water levels of the electrons, so to speak,

find a common bubble that causes one metal to charge positively,one to charge negatively.

And that establishes a potential difference between the metal, a voltage usually on the order of about a volt or so.

Well, the same kind of thing can happen if you have two different kinds of semiconductor.

Semiconductors, of course, are ubiquitous in society.

they're things largely made out of silicon.

There are small, very small devices, and they're doped,

contaminated with very small impurities, 1 part in a million or so of impurity elements.

There are two basic kinds of impurities.

Ones which render of electrons into the silicon lattice

and once which create positive holes in silicon lattice.

The ones that liberate extra electrons into the lattice are called N type semiconductors,

and these would be created by doping, let's say one part in a million or so into the silicon of something like phosphorus.

On the other hand, if you were to dope it with a different element, something like boron,

that would create excess holes in the lattice and you can create two different kinds of silicon,

one which is N type and one is P type.

And if you were to join them along an interface, the ones with extra free electrons,

these extra electrons can diffuse into the positive or the P type silicon

and the holes from this p side can diffuse into the N side.

This cross charged defusion creates a charge imbalance across a very small region called the depletion region.

We have positive charges here, negative charges here.

And this creates an electric field in the silicon in a potential difference between these two pieces of silicon,

which is on the order of about a half to a full volt.

+Is this a common occurrence or is this something else, especially though the silicon that you have?

Not at all, this is found in your electronic watches, your computers, anything that has a transistor in it.

This is what's called a PN diode or NP diode.

These are very, very common electrical devices.

They're the mainstay of semiconductor electronics.

This process is well known, understood, theoretically and verified experimentally.

There's really no question that this occurs, at least within the scientific community presently.

Now, if you were to take this particular piece of silicon and kind of bend it around into a new shape like this,

you would still have the charge diffusion right at this junction here

and you'd have a different potential on this side versus this side.

this side would be biased positively, this side negatively by this charge diffusion.

If you then wrap this around and bring it down to a small, to a region where you have a physical separation opening between these two,

if you have positive charges here and negative charges here, that establishes an electric field across this region

and there would be a potential drop across this region equivalent to the one here

the electric field stores energy and the electric field energy I can write down its is proportional to the square of the electric field intensity or strength.

The stored electric field energy here turns this device essentially into a capacitor.

This is a capacitor which stores the electrostatic energy in the gap.

You haven't paid for this.

You've not hooked this up to a battery.

There's no external voltage source associated with this.

This has established this energy in this yellow region, the electric field,

solely by the existence of this depletion region, which is unavoidable.

So you now have a capacitor which in principle will stay charged forever.

Now, capacitors, they're used in electronics to drive all sorts of things like the flash cameras which "Tony" has

or cardiac defibrillators.

You find it in a you know, in the emergency room or something like that.

And what a capacitor does is that it stores electric field energy.

Well, as it stores energy.

It occurred to us whether we could extract that energy somehow and one way which we found we could do it.

There are several ways and I'll go over both of them

is to use just a small plug of a dielectric,

Just as a piece of metal is pulled into a magnetic field, dielectric are pulled into electric fields.

So you can imagine that if you were to put a small plug of material here that we friction ¿?Within this channel, it can get pulled into the electric field.

And if this were also a conductor with the conductor positive charges, the negative charges together have them short out which would kill the electric field,

leaving a larger electric field ahead of them, which would continue to pull this plug forward in the field.

As it shorted out the field here, it would still see a higher field here being pulled in this direction.

The field back behind it would not have recovered as fast yet the field ahead will always be larger.

And this plug can be pulled all the way through the channel as it comes to the end of the channel.

There's no further electric field here, so it's no longer being accelerated.

But meanwhile, the electric field behind it has been rebuilding itself.

Once it rebuilds itself, it pulls the plug back and the process can repeat again and again.

So we have shown based on calculations of real dielectrics, with real frictional coefficients,

with real electrical conductivities, that in principle you could build a small plug,

something on the order of a fraction of a micron size which could be pulled in and out through this channel millions of times per second and never really stop.

It doesn't require a new power source.

Because the power is being supplied by the electric field,

which itself is being generated by thermal processes somewhere else.

So this would be a non sentient "Maxwell demon" that challenges the Second law by creating organized motion out of thermal processes, out of heat.

There is no other power source driving this.

So that's one version of a "Maxwell Demon".

if you were to tie a small magnet to it and have it go in and out of a coil of wire, you would have an electrical generator.

So you could generate electrical power from this mechanical motion in principle.

Well, I came up with the idea probably about, oh, four years ago, three or four years ago, something like that.

It took about a year to develop it.

Dr. "Jeffrey Wright" was instrumental in helping carry out numerical simulations, as was "Andrew Putnam", one of my former students who did a terrific job.

+Do you have constraints with regard to the weight of the ¿?

+The mass involved, the drag and all those things?.

Yes.

We've investigated what we consider all the salient parameters of the system, including electrical conductivity, dielectric constants, mass friction, all of these.

And we find that if you build it small enough, something smaller than about a micron in size,

you can make a device which in theory should be able to perform as indicated in this video.

+Have you built that yet?

no, we have not.

We would like to.

The technical difficulties put it probably at the state of the art of micro manufacturing, maybe a little bit beyond.

But we think within the next five or ten years, the state of the art for micro electromechanical and nano electromechanical manufacturing

will probably reach the point where this could be manufactured if there was the will to do so.

+ And okay, does this put out more than it takes?

Well, again, this is a theoretical study we've done.

This is not an experimental study based on the theoretical studies it should be able to put out more.

It should be able to take energy heat from the heat bath and turn it into mechanical work

at a power rate and a power density, which is rather large in the sense that if you calculate the volume of this device,

each one of these devices will put out roughly a nanowatt of power, which is a very, very small amount.

But these are devices are very small themselves about the size of a blood cell.

So if you were to stack them all together into something the size of this table,

they could instantaneously put out as much power in principle as a nuclear power plant

* The problem would be that you freeze entire room.

The problem is that if it's turning heat into work, it would put out a power level of about a gigawatt per cubic meter.

But this thing would cool down to roughly absolute zero in 3 seconds if you were in the numbers.

+So getting energy from nothing but, you know, converting thermal energy into mechanical energy and that thermal energy have got to come from somewhere.

That's right.

The room is full of mechanical energy.

Let me give you a demonstration.

If you take this table here, this table is at roughly about 300 kelvin.

About room temperature, 20 degrees C,

The molecules in here are all moving about in this table at roughly the speed of sound.

But they're all moving in different and random directions such that all their momentum essentially cancel.

If you were to divide up this table perfectly into those molecules which are moving to the left, to the right, forward, backwards, up and down.

And simply divide those up.

This table would decompose at the speed of sound of six parts going in opposite in opposite directions at roughly the speed of sound.

That's how much energy is intrinsically present in this table in the form of heat.

And that's true of everything else.

Your shoes, your legs, you, all the other tables, the wall, the ceiling, the air.

All of these have intrinsic energy, but you can't tap them because of the randomization of the molecular motions.

They tend to cancel each other out, and it's very, very difficult to rectify them.

In fact, to rectify their motions creates more entropy than the reduction in entropy that this rectification would imply.

That is what the second law says.

You can't achieve this rectification without paying for it and paying for it dearly.

So in subverting the second law, what in principle would allow you to do is rectify the intrinsic heat in a room like this.

And as a result, you can run all the appliances in the room forever without ever plugging anything into the wall,

simply recycling the heat energy again and again.

And that would be a rather wonderful thing.

it could in principle be a solution basically forever to an energy problem.

As long as the universe is not frozen, it will have plenty of energy to run itself.

It's all present here

+And you could, in theory, have some other thing that generates heat next to it to get on top of it?

No, no, not really.

If you think about it, if you run the TV camera you're using right now has a battery in it, that battery is running it.

But most of that energy ends up as heat, which goes into the room.

If you had something which could collect that heat and re-use it, it would simply take that he turn it back into electrical energy and run your camera again.

So it's not like you've ever lost the energy.

It's just being turned and went into another form which you could recycle.

When we develop this, we recognize that this is the electrostatic equivalent of a magnetic railgun.

-Right, exactly,exactly.

but it's not magnetism electrics, electrostatics here.

But this is like a electrostatic railgun, in a sense.

No one's ever come up with this. And it only works on a small scale.

This will not work on a tabletop size.

It will only work when you have very intense fields on very small objects.

And for it to be sustained by the intrinsic biasing of this semiconductor requires that it be some micron or

+ The size of the nature of semiconductors?

Well, because the forces are so small, you only can move small bits of matter.

And so you have to build them very small.

And to get these naturally, to get to these intense electric fields.

And that gap requires that you build the gaps are very, very small.

+So it's very powerless, there's no power applied to this.

Well, let's be clear about it.

It is being powered by ultimately by the thermal energy in the device.

In other words, the heat in the device is powering it because you're not getting energy for free here.

Second of all, it's not about that.

+But there's no external power supply.

That's correct.

+There's no voltages charging the materials.

No, the charging it's actually created by a trade off.

But what you have here is, on the N types of the conductor,

you have the electrons which want to diffuse out and you have in the P type you have holes that wanted to diffuse out.

So when you bring these two together, these electrons and holes naturally diffuse into the other medium.

But when that occurs you get a charge separation which creates the electric field.

So it's a natural diffusive second law process which gives rise to the second law violation,

which is the irony of it all.

Second law actually turns on itself here.

The violation occurs because you have turned heat energy into mechanics, into macroscopic motion of this piston.

That's where the violation comes.

You've turned heat into work.

That's that's forbidden by the most fundamental statement of the second law.

If you want to define the second law in terms of what you can and cannot do with heat,

then what you've done is that you have turned disorganized random thermal motions in your solid

into some a rectified macroscopic motion of a block of material, you have rectified disorganized motion

that violates the idea that the entropy of the universe must always increase.

Here we have shown a way in which the entropy of the universe can decrease.

You have taken random thermal motions and turn them into directed coherent motions of a macroscopic block of material.

So that is a statement of the second law, which deals with entropy that would have come about by "Clausius" about 1865 when he first discovered entropy.

A couple of years ago, we hit on an alternative form of this, which actually is superior to it because you can build it more easily.

This one requires very fine micro machinery parts.

A simpler version, which we're actually in the process of building prototypes for.

Is this where you have the same basic idea, again, a P type semiconductor, N type semiconductor

arranged such that you have a positive and negative potential established between the two regions.

Again, the yellow corresponds to the electric field in a gap between the N and P region.

We call this the hammer.

I call this the anvil.

These are very thin slivers of semiconductor which are flexible.

So silicon is known to make very good springs.

And these are cantilever springs.

So this is a cutaway two dimensional drawing of it.

Imagine you have positive charges here, negative charges here.

Under these circumstances, these positive charges would be attracted to the negative charges.

And presumably this could pull down the N region, stretching these springs, causing the N region to come down, touch the P region and short out.

Once it shorts out, the electric field has been obliterated.

And so there's no longer a pull downward, this material then is released.

It gets pulled up by the springs.

Meanwhile, the electric field can rebuild in the gap by the same thermal processes that created them originally.

Then the attraction would occur again and the hammer would be pulled down to the anvil.

Touch, discharge, come back.

Now we've done a number of simulations which were using realistic physical characteristics of silicon and P in diodes.

We find that if you can match the timescale over which the electric field rebuilds,

which we call the electrical time constant, we should be on the order of tens to hundreds of nanoseconds.

If you match that time constant to the mechanical time constant of the spring.

In other words, the normal resonant frequency of this cantilever,

when you match these two, then you can set up what's called a resonant electromechanical oscillation,

kind of like what happens when you push a kid on a swing.

You hit them at the right frequency, You can build up the oscillation

same way you can use the electric field energy here to build up an oscillation in this hammer-anvil

and create a self-sustained oscillation.

This can be demonstrated using today's technology doesn't require anything beyond which has already been developed.

but again, it has to be built very small, the reasons being the time constant for rebuilding this electric field are very short.

They're the time constants are in the order of tens to hundreds of nanoseconds,

which means that the frequencies associated with mechanical oscillation have to be on the order of 1 to 10 megahertz,

very high frequency, maybe even a hundred megahertz.

At those frequencies, you have to build the devices very small.

Otherwise they tear themselves apart by their mechanical accelerations.

So they have to be built small to sustain the high accelerations and frequencies.

And also to create these large energy densities associated with the electric field.

So overall, this thing has to be built probably on the order of about one micron in size or smaller to make it work.

Nonetheless, this is well within nanotechnology.

I mean,modern standard off the shelf transistors now are being built down to size scales on the order of about a 10th of a micron or something like that.

So using standard technology, you can build something this size.

And how do you generate electricity?

Well, again, if you had a magnet here on the top of the hammer and it were and we're moving up and down through some sort of electric coil,

it would presumably generate electrical power like a regular electrical generator at high frequency.

But this would have lots of other uses, too.

But nonetheless, the energy that you get out of this or the power you can get out of this

is actually fairly small on the order of about 10 to the minus 9 watts on that order to the minus 8 watts, which is very, very small.

It's like an ant or a flea crawling up a wall, something very small.

But on the other hand, this is very small itself.

So although this doesn't put out much power by itself, if you were to couple these to a large number of them.

In other words, if you were to have as many of these as would fit in the volume of a desk about a cubic meter or so,

the power output for that desk instantaneously would be on the order of that of a nuclear power plant about 10 to the 9 watts.

Now, of course, that could not go on very long, because if what we're saying is true

that you're converting thermal energy heat into mechanical energy and if you're creating mechanical energy at a rate of 10 to the 9 watts

that comes from heat, your objects going to cool down very fast, in fact.

So a block the size of a desk would cool down to absolute zero in a few seconds at that power output rate,

The way you would actually use it would be to make large panels of very thin micron thin panels,

spread them out across a wall and then convert it to make electricity that way.

So instead of having a block a meter high, you slice it into a million slices

so now you have one square kilometer of this material, and then you can use it.

Also it would absorb energy, it would absorb its ambient heat better.

So if you had something like a chalkboard which was paneled over with this stuff, the chalkboard here is about a meter and a half by about 5 meters.

It's about 7 and a half square meters.

If it's absorbing 100 watts per square meter, you could get about 750 watts of power just from that blackboard sitting there.

It would cool down slightly, but it could power everything else in this room continuously, forever.

You'd be turning up the heat in this room into work and then using our electrical power.

That electrical power would run all the all the computers in the room,

and then the heat generated by the computer would go back into the panels,

go back into electricity, and go back into the computers again.

You'd be recycling energy.

The whole idea of recycling energy is foreign to our way of thinking, because of the second law,

we naturally assume the energy that we use coming out of the wall or used in an automobile is used once and never used again.

But if you were to actually subvert the second law and again, it has not been broken experimentally yet, but if you could

you could reuse energy again and again forever, it would be completely recyclable energy.

-Have you tried filing patents on this?

We published this

well, we put it this way in terms of patenting it.

We have a company which was instituted to do to protect the intellectual property rights.

And we're thinking about what exactly would work out right now.

But in terms of this, this was published in Foundations of Physics back in 2000.

To many patent rights associated with this have evaporated.

This one has not been published per say.

It's iffy because this resident cantilever idea, it's already been tried for ones that are powered with batteries.

We're planning on powering it with its own potential.

but we have a few ideas.

This one is how to turn this energy into chemical energy.

In other words, electrostatic energy to chemical energy.

We're working on a paper on it right now.

It's unclear where it's going to go.

So you can turn this off the record or just do what you want.

Here's the basic.

+Talk about it if you want, is totally good.

Your N and P region, positive and negative.

So you have positive charges here, negative charges here and an electric field going down through this material

if you take some sort of neutral atom, bring it in to this... this could be any P material or two different metals like aluminum

and your filling doesn't really matter what it is, bring in a neutral atom.

The neutral atom can ionize in the surface.

This is called surface ionization. I use it all the time in making plasmas

when this dissolves it gets accelerated by this electric field and will be entered and it will be accelerated across this gap

basically from rest up to the velocity associated with about a 1 volt drop in potential.

to put that in perspective, if you take an atom and accelerated through one volt potential

when it thermalices,it randomizer its motion comes to an equilibrium temperature.

It'll be at a temperature of 12,000 degrees, twice the temperature of the sun.

Okay, so you bring in this neutral atom.

Ionized, it dissolves, comes down here and comes and when it arrives at the bottom,

there's lots of energy indicated by the start which can stimulate other chemical reactions,

basically enough energy to drive a chemical reaction.

And then It can just give up the electron again or pick up an electron from the other side and recycle through the system or just leave.

But the point is, by falling through this gap this ion can get enough energy to drive the temperature of your gas up

by several thousand degrees in principle or to stimulate chemical reactions.

So we've turned electrostatic energy into chemical energy by this method, but it only happens locally.

After all, where did this energy come from originally?

It came from heat.

So if you let this thing relax again, it's never going to be hotter than what it started out for the whole lattice,

but it'll be a local temperature rise of 4000 degrees or I mean, if you spread it out to three dimensions at 12,000 goes to 4000 divided by three,

but it'll go up toward the temperature of the sun locally.

It's really rather remarkable.

And all we've used here is the intrinsic bias associated with either metals or semiconductors.

Very simple process.

+And when did you think of this?

I thought of this this summer, actually, I was at a conference in Prague and there was a physical chemist there.

Her name is "Tamar Seidemann" from Northwestern University.

She and I chatted after my talk and we sat down at lunch and hatched this idea on a lunch in a cafe in Prague.

+What i wanted to ask you back to the first one of the ¿? What was it like for you to think of this?

Well, I thought of it out of desperation, frankly.

I mean, I had been kicked around professionally, I guess, for about ten years on these various other Second Law challenges,

the two plasma challenges which I developed in the early 1990s,

the chemical ones, which I did in the mid 1990s, and the gravitational one which I did in the late 1990s.

And so all of these were exotic thermodynamic thermodynamic regimes, ones which are not easily accessible or testable.

When I was in Cincinnati in 1995, one of my friends in plasma physics, "Jeffrey Bowles"

We were crossing the street and said, you know, plasmas are a lot like solid state physics.

So if you found one in plasma, there should be one of solid state physics.

There should be an analog.

And I didn't know anything about solid state physics in 1995, but by 2000 I taught myself enough

that I back engineered the solid state challenge for thinking about the plasma challenge,

which I developed ten years earlier.

So it's really based on a hunch given to me by a friend crossing the street in Cincinnati back in 1995,

and he didn't know what he was talking.

He just threw out the idea and I had to chew on it for a while and I came up with this.

And then then "Jeff Wright" got involved after I'd come up with it and we kind of fleshed it out.

He and "Andrew", those guys were very instrumental in making this thing work,

so most of us were serendipitous,

+ so we might get into a little bit about how this wasn't possible 100 years ago when these laws were formulated

Well, if you look at science over the last 100 years, there's almost no area of science which has not been transformed in one way or another.

You can look at classical mechanics where space and time were considered absolutes in the Newtonian sense.

And this and these ideas were shattered.

Starting about 1905, with with "Einstein's" special general theory of Relativity in 1905 and 1916.

So the ideas of absolute time and space have been revised

or ideas about the corpuscular solid nature of matter has dissolved under the development of quantum mechanics,

where solid particles now become waves.

Our ideas about determinism have been undermined by chaos theory.

All of these, a lot of our presumptions about the world have been undermined by discoveries in the 20th century.

But thermodynamics, which dates back 150 years, were virtually untouched in the sense that people were unwilling to look at these,

look at the laws of thermodynamics seriously in light of developments in the 20th century, and see whether they still applied.

There was always a mystique around the second law that no one really wanted to attack.

Starting roughly around 1990.

There was the mid 1990s were starting to be a push toward reexamining the second law in terms of quantum mechanics.

And then there were a lot of several renegade groups who looked at absolute challenges to it, and we just started picking at it.

I don't know why it started.

It seems to have been kind of a confluence of a lot of people's work,

and there were half a dozen groups around the world that all worked, sort of working on the same problem

all about within about five years of each other without knowing about each other.

It was just rather coincidence.

You had "Lindsey Gordon" in New Zealand.

He was probably the first guy in the modern Second Law movement.

He started about 1984 to make some proposals about what biochemical membranes might be able to do in terms of subverting the second law.

These articles were largely stillborn.

They were more or less ignored by the scientific community.

Early 1980s.

"Jack ¿?" From Texas made some proposals about rectifying heat.

These were largely ignored. The first stuff and the new stuff in the 1990s was from San Diego.

We put we proposed above total over the last ten years about five different challenges in different areas.

Plasma physics, chemical physics, gravitational physics and solid state.

There was work by "Father ¿?" From Charles University in Prague.

He proposed about eight or so theoretical challenges which are based on quantum mechanics.

He was looking at membrane pumps and noticed that quantum mechanical rules allow subversion of the second law

and basically violating what's called detailed balance in quantum mechanics.

A group in the Netherlands and Armenia, "Newman Hazen" and "Oliver Gideon" showed that quantum mechanical entanglement,

which is all the rage now in quantum theory, can give rise to second law challenges as well.

They came up with two or three of those themselves.

You also have work by "Peter Kes" in Superconductivity,

where you propose a very simple mechanism whereby you can use the quantum mechanical superconducting transition

to create a small engine which he calls the "magneto ¿? Engine"

This is closely related to work by "Aleksey Nikolov" Who was looking at soft rectification with currents driven in superconducting loops, mesoscopic superconducting loops.

So there's a whole slew of different challenges out there right now, and there appears to be no general rubric under which they fall.

They're all individual.

Some of them are related to each other, but there seem to be different groupings, but no overall vision of all of them.

You don't really knows what connects them all, aside from the fact that they all seem to turn disorder into order spontaneously.

In July of 2002, we had what's called the first international conference on quantum limits to the second law, and that was held here at the University of San Diego.

We brought together about 120 researchers from 25 countries around the world,

and it was the first conference, to my knowledge, in history, to discuss the possible violation of the second law or challenges to it.

Again, none of these challenges have actually been experimentally verified yet,

although there have been corroborative experiments on several of them indicating that the basic processes work.

In other words, you can show, for instance, that superconducting transition occurs in a certain way,

which would be favorable second law violation

or my plasma ones, I've conducted high temperature plasma experiments which show a voltage

the way you'd expect for a second law violation.

But it's one thing to show the underlying processes work.

It's another thing to actually get useful work out of the system.

That's the trick is to, you know, cross all your teams, dot all your eyes and cover all your bases

as to where all your heating work went and balance everything out.

It's very difficult to do that and experiments and make it make an airtight case.

But I think there's enough corroborative evidence right now to seriously question the second law

+ Is possible to give an example of the kind of demonstration.

Sure.

And this one, I think in particular, the double, the resient cantilever, if you could build this thing on the size of a blood cell or so you started oscillating,

if it just keeps oscillating forever, it doesn't stop.

There's something fishy going on.

I mean, assuming you're not driving it some other way.

So you'd have to isolate it from all sound sources, all vibrational sources, all electrical sources, all electromagnetic sources.

And then you have to follow tests where you slowly make other ones, with less doping, and see at what point it fails.

You build up a case that the second law is viable there.

the second law's so lock tight and believed by the scientific community that the standards of proof of second law violation are extremely high.

And so you couldn't just simply make something that starts vibrating.

and expect people to believe you.

You'd have to do all sorts of different tests and gather enough evidence so that any objection anyone raises, you can counter with experimental evidence

when at last you have counted every piece, every possible exception and every possible caveat to anywhere that occurs to anybody

such that they have no further way of arguing against you then the intellectual honesty dictates that they must agree that the second law is viable.

But until you exhaust all of these caveats, you're not going to convince the scientific community of the truth of this.

+Once you get through all the exceptions to prove it out to the ¿?

They might do that.

But on the other hand, if you market this thing and people start buying it and they start creating home power and using this

and they're not paying any power bills, and I think people will start paying attention

because then the proof is in the pudding.

The second law is an experimental observation.

So if you can experiment, you have to experimentally prove this.

You can't really do as we've done so far and simply write it out on paper and say it should work.

That's nice and fine, but maybe nature has a trick up her sleeve, which is to keep you from making this thing work.

And you don't know what it is until you try it.

And ultimately, scientific truth is determined by experiment.

Well, we put it this way God is an experimentalist,

after all he created the world.

If he had been a theorist, he would have written down the equation only and got the sign wrong.

And so I truly believe that.

But ultimately, truth is determined by experiment.

Theory can certainly help you out to understand it.

But it's not going to determine truth, experiment determs truth.

And so I'm absolutely adamant about this.

The second law is inviolable until it's viable, until it is violated.

+What were some of the things that they observed back in ¿? days that caused them to formulate the second law?

well, most obvious is that you throw a bunch of wood into your steam engine or coal with water in it,

and you burn all the wood and make steam and you get a certain amount of mechanical energy out and you're all done.

Everything's a lot hotter and you can't seem to use that burned up wood again.

I guess the most obvious observation, you get some work out, but you've created a lot of heat and a lot of entropy ultimately,

and you can't get it back once it goes off into the atmosphere and the heat dissipates, you can't gather it back again and use it to drive your engine.

That's an observation about the world, and it's a very powerful one.

It's been it stood all experimental tests for the last 250 years.

And before that, even if you want to look back further.

So the second law is a very, very powerful and useful law

the question that we're raising is are there ways of subverting it in subtle ways which may be useful to humanity and to science ultimately, in other ways?

+Are there any more obvious ways in which it gets converted?

+And actually in observable conditions in nature?.

To my knowledge, there are no

if there were known subversions of the second law, It would not be a law in the same sense that it is now.

the second law would not be absolute if we actually knew ways of subverting it or if it was agreed that it was subverted already in nature.

+The way the sun works has not been subverted

No. not at all

the stars are tremendous entropy generators, tremendous entropy generators.

In fact, it's only by these gradients of entropy that you have life on this planet.

I mean, the fact that the sun is a blackbody radiation source that is at about 5700 degrees kelvin casting heat on this planet

and that we degrade into and use in photosynthesis, solar energy and so on,

and then discard and then run our machines and discard that waste heat back out into space.

We're always creating entropy in the process, but it actually is a continuous down conversion of the quality of energy

as it comes from the core of the sun to the surface to earth, back out into space as heat that keeps this place running.

If you didn't have this gradient in entropy, where the entropy is increasing all the way down the chain,

through all these reactions, we would be essentially in equilibrium now and we all be dead.

+So it's cold and dead.

Well, cold or hot and dead doesn't matter.

If you go to the core of the sun, you can be hot and dead.

But the point is it's only by the continuous non-equilibrium degradation of high energy sources into lower energy,

lower quality energy sources and heat or higher entropy that the world progresses from one state into the other.

the universe moves ahead because of its non-equilibrium nature.

+So it does make some sense that in subverting the second law, some sort of very clever technological mechanism would need to be imported

yeah, it would.

And that's really what it requires.

Nature is not going to come up with it itself.

I don't think. I'm not aware of any process I wish it would. But you need to engineer the geometry and composition of your devices

in such a way that you can create these special conditions whereby he creates its own downfall.

Something like this electric field in the gap.

Nature is not going to create a device like this spontaneously,

and even if it did, it would have to create a perfectly micro machined dielectric plug to go in and out.

That's just not going to happen by itself.

The superconducting ones, which are proposed by "Kes" and by "Nicolav",

these superconducting states, are not going to occur naturally and exist except in very, very exotic locations in the universe.

And even then, it's not going to necessarily result in creation of work.

So all of these, virtually all of the ones that I'm aware of are or have to be manmade, except for one possibility.

And I'm not sure you want to cover this in your in your talk or not.

There have always been speculations that if, in fact, the second law can be violated,

why hasn't life resorted to second law violation mechanisms?

Okay. That's that's a legitimate question.

I mean, in fact, it's often used to say, well, the second law is absolute,

because if it weren't absolute nature in its soaring cleverness and diversity would have already found a way of subverting it.

I don't find that convincing for a number of reasons.

The first being that is not proven that all biochemical processes actually conform to the second law.

All the ones that we know of do

But the human genome has 32,000 genes or so, I believe, and makes on the order of what, 100 million proteins of some some enormous number.

Only a small number of these biochemical pathways have actually been explored.

And so you can't claim with absolute certainty that that's not the case.

if were to bet money, I'd say they probably all do follow the second law.

On the other hand, I would also argue that the conditions that you find on the Earth's surface,

for instance, ones in which you have lots of energy streaming from the sun to the surface,

lots of chemical energy available for plants and animals is not the ideal condition to have what I would call thermal synthetic life.

And this word was coined just recently.

but the idea is this, there are two basic kinds of life that inhabit the earth, photosynthetic life and chemosynthetic life.

Photosynthetic life takes photons, light and convert it into chemical energy.

As photosynthesis is photosynthetic, chemosynthetic life takes chemicals and uses raw chemicals for the energy of life.

That would be something like you eating a beef steak, something like that.

You're not photosynthesizing anything.

Even though you're sure it's green.

You're basically taking chemical energy, breathing oxygen, and combining that oxygen with the proteins and the carbohydrates

and getting mechanical work out of the process.

That's right. So you're chemosynthetic life because you have two basic branches of life.

Well, what if you were to have some sort of life form that could use heat directly and convert it into work?

That would be thermo synthetic life.

And so there have been a few proposals for this.

I think there is a possibility you could find it in certain places.

You'd have to look for a place where it's not competing with chemosynthetic or photosynthetic life,

which means if you're going to find it, it would have to be in an energy poor environment away from the sun and chemical energy sources.

The best place to find it would be probably deep in the earth, probably down a few kilometers where it's dark.

And so we're in an energy desert where there's somewhere like granite where you wouldn't have very many chemicals available to use.

We have I've looked at the possibilities for this, and it turns out that the cell membrane

a cell membrane is, you know, surrounds cells and these can be charged positive or negatively.

It's basically like this.

You have a natural capacitor which can be built into cells in principle.

And I have proposed, at least in this book, the possible mechanisms by which you could possibly take

the electrostatic potential, the electrostatic energy, electric field inside a cell membrane and convert it into chemical energy.

And that's I think it's quite a long shot, but it's certainly worth proposing

and it turns out that a lot of the chemical machinery necessary for thermal synthetic life, at least as I envision it.

When I proposed the idea originally, I started looking into the biochemical literature,

and it turns out most most of the basic chemical structures which I proposed already exist in cells, which is rather remarkable.

So it's almost like all the electrical characteristics are all in place.

But the question is, when would these be employed? I don't know.

i'm not sure you could find thermo synthetic life easily, but I don't think that it's out of the question.

if we proposed ways of violating the second law, which are viable.

I think nature, which is a lot more clever than I am, would certainly come up with a to eventually

+I may have this all wrong. don't systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium violate the second law?

No.

+I'm thinking of something that again, I may have this completely wrong, but the "Ilya Romanovich Prigogine" Wasn't involved in this?

He was looking at systems far from equilibrium.

But his claim was that this movement of systems, far from equilibrium into organized structures like life itself can occur only if they're driven.

In other words, only if you keep feeding energy in, can you keep these organized structures going.

And so the non-equilibrium aspect of them is there, certainly, but they are large entropy generators also.

So, no, he would not support necessarily the violation of second law, in the way we did.

On the other hand, he wanted to come to the conference but was too sick to come.

He sent one of his students instead.

Yeah, but he wanted to come to the conference.

He was very interested in this because of his interest in thermodynamics and in organized states.

+he was a Nobel?

Yes. 1977, I believe.

But my impression of my readings of his work, he would not himself subscribe to violation of the second law.

+Now, what motivates you to, you've been involved in this for a long time, he seems like in doubt about this.

What motivated me?.

I grew up with the second law being the son of a physical chemist, and it's always been in the background growing up.

It's always intrigued me. It is a deep subject which touches almost every aspect of our lives.

I did it more or less as a challenge.

I have to say it was in the early 1990s.

"Zurek" and "Bennett" and other people had come to the conclusion that the "Maxwell Demon" would be foiled by his own erasure of information,

and that made big news at the time.

But the national team had finally been slain, and I thought, well, that seemed rather obvious what they were doing.

I wonder if the second law really can be violated in a different way.

And so I started thinking about it, and one thing led to another, and I started coming up with ideas on chemical challenges and plasma challenges.

And it just kind of led from there.

I did not wish to be in this field as long as I have

I expected to be in it for just maybe a few years.

But in seeing the extreme resistance and hostility of the scientific community, I dug in my heels and said, I'm not going to take this.

And so I just continued to work in the area to try to justify the ideas.

And it just so happened that at the same time, several other groups were working in the area as well

and they made headway and we reached a critical mass at which point we could actually have a conference

and then it starts to legitimize the field.

This conference proceedings is actually published by the American Institute of Physics,

which is the main conference proceedings publisher in the United States.

Maybe the world, just having a conference which is published by AIP adds legitimacy to the question, which It never had before.

So I think that was important. I'm proud of that.

But I think at this point, there are so many questions surrounding the second law

that no honest scientist can legitimately dismiss second law challenges out of hand any more.

It's intellectually untenable to do so.

And it's now a political struggle to gain enough visibility and enough converts to get it actually examined carefully.

Certainly a handful of scientists, maybe a couple dozen of us who are actually in the challenging business

could be squashed by the scientific community or more easily ignored.

But I think ultimately people are going to have to come to grips with the second law,

particularly if somebody comes up with a real challenge, a real violator experimentally,

they're going to say, well, why does it work?

They can't simply ignore that.

I mean, it's one thing to have your theory is another thing to ignore experiment.

So we're just plugging away.

That's all I can say right now.

We're just biding our time and waiting for things to develop, working as hard as we can.

But ultimately, it's a political struggle.

-I have another question.

-I think we're all agreed that the vacuum possesses huge amount of energy.

that's a theoretical prediction. There's nothing measured.

It is predicted to have high energy content.

-Fair enough.

-Now, hypothetically or theoretically, assuming that prediction is correct.

-How would the second law, rigid application of a second rule impinge on any theoretical ability to tap into that energy?

I'm not really aware that the second law would put a monkey wrench in the utilization of the vacuum energy assuming that it exists.

because the vacuum energy itself would represent a new, in a sense, untapped form of energy.

We haven't been able to actually draw out and use.

So the second law really doesn't directly speak to that.

That would be more in terms of conservation of energy or the definition of energy.

So if vacuum energy exists, they were just it would go into the category of a new kind of energy.

Like originally there was only one kind of energy thought that existed, mechanical energy.

And there was the discovery that heat constituted molecular random energy around in motion or heat or something, that heat was a form of energy.

Then you throw heat into the category of energy also.

Then you're going to throw in chemical energy.

Then when you find out that you can convert mass into energy, you have mass energy.

Then you find the vacuum as energy, you call it vacuum energy.

You keep adding new kinds of energy into your definition of energy, all of which apparently can convert one into another.

But I don't know anybody who can give a perfectly suitable definition of even energy.

I mean, it's energy is something that you can in principle use to make things go.

Maybe that's the best way to put it.

But their inner convertible, that seems to be a property of them.

But I've never heard anyone give me a suitable definition of energy.

So it's funny because you talk about all these absolutes in science.

You know, second law is absolute.

Entropy always increases, energy is conserved, but no one can even define what they're talking about necessarily.

it's a lot naughtier than people think when a lot of people think scientists think in terms of absolutes.

Well, scientists are artists.

They have a view of the world which is often very personal.

And my view of the world it's my personal view of the world, which is more or less orthodox.

I mean, I agree with most things with most people in the scientific community, but I'm not orthodox when it comes to the second law.

Only in as much as I think that there are regimes where it can be violated, for the most part,

I would agree with everybody that the world is free of second law violations.

The only place where I run into trouble with everybody, everyone else is that I say there might be places where you can subvert it.

It's a very small thing, but it turns out to be very important to a lot of people

because they would prefer to have absolute certainty on this issue. You know?

I'm not willing to admit that you yet

+can you to try to give me a sixth grade level definition of the second law?

Second law is the tendency of the universe to increase its disorder.

Now that's different than the conservation of energy system.

That's right.

conservation of energy says.

What you start with in terms of energy you end with, is all conservation of energy says.

You can turn your energy from one form into another, from work into heat, from heat into work.

To a certain degree, you can have gravitational energy, you can have chemical energy,

you can have mass energy, have vacuum energy, you can have spring energy.

You can have all different kinds of energy.

And they might be able to convert.

But whatever you start with, even after they all transmute into each other, what you start with, you end with.

That's all the first of all says, first law just says you can't destroy it and you can't create it.

You just have what you have.

The second law tells you that the energy that you start with tends to degrade

and you can't recreate that energy into a non useful form to useful form very easily.

There are so many different ways of stating the second law that no matter how I state the second law, I'm going to miss something.

I can give you 21 different definitions if you want, to me is also like a pointillism, a painting.

I mean, you can stand back and look at all the definitions and you have a good view of what the second law is,

but you try zeroing in on one little definition of the second law, and you've got a point and you lost the picture.

So the way I think about the second law is in terms of all the definitions,

all the statements of the second law, and see, this pretty much covers all circumstances,

but any one definition is usually going to leave you a little bit deficient in terms of your overall understanding of nature.

I think there are two probably the two key definitions of the second law or the key formulation of the second law.

One deals with entropy and one deals with heat work, which is probably the two basic ways in terms of entropy.

You would say for any spontaneous process, the entropy of the universe does not decrease.

In terms of heat work, you would say there is no physical process by which you can turn heat solely back into work.

So once in terms of heat work to turn terms as written in terms of entropy,

but they're equivalent, probably not exactly

+in electricity, how does that form ¿?

in terms of the second law?

Well, if you put electricity through a resistor, for instance, the resistor heats up.

That electrical work, electrical energy work would be I squared R or a B squared R or whatever,

that in the resistor doctrine that electrical energy turns into heat in the resistor

and basically turn it all into, you change this organized electronic flow into some sort of jiggled motion of molecules in the resistor,

and you've turned coherent electronic motion into random thermal vibrations.

So we've turned heat into work or excuse me, turned work into heat.

Sorry, my apologies

so any process you can name, any national process you can name aside from the second law challenges.

I can probably identify where and how the interview turns up, but it always does.

in throwing up all this paper into the air and letting it fall down illustrates that, this is a standard kind of process, no matter what you do.

if you throw water up in the air to splash all over the place, if you see water sitting on the table, it's just not going to sit there.

It's going to evaporate, fill the room, which is a more disorganized state.

If you breathe and your breath comes out, just doesn't hang there.

It spreads out and fills the room.

Everything you do tends to increase the possibilities available to it, to increase the disorder.

On the flip side of that, everyone talks about disorder being a bad thing.

It's a wonderful thing.

I mean, disorder in a sense, is a greater complexity and richness to the atomic structure or the atomic description of the universe.

The universe becomes richer as it becomes more disorganized.

It's just a question of how useful is that new richness to us.

We call it disorder and call it heat.

We call it friction.

We call it wasted energy because we can't use it anymore.

But it's still there on a microscopic level, increasing the diversity of what's going on down into the atomic level.

I would not want to see second law violators use on a universal basis because you freeze the universe out.

You basically take all the heat, turn it into work.

When you're all done, everything's cold and you're just as dead as if you had died by heat death.

+Is this in relation to the universe continuosly expanding?

Well, the fact the universe is continuously expanding that in a sense adds more possible microstates for the universe

and in a sense gives the universe more possibilities continuously in which to which to play, so to speak.

So classical heat death was described in the 19th century.

Victorian heat death, as they call it, will never really occur, at least not in the way they say.

But the real source of entropy in the universe turns out to be gravitational sources, things falling, planets forming,

stars forming, black holes forming in particular, and then their ultimate evaporation.

That's really where the entropy of the universe increases.

-Does this mean that they could make a move just to revisit something that I mentioned earlier this morning, the work that "Evans" did in Australia?

Yes.

-And how does that relate to what...?

Well, the work by "Evans" fills out the picture about how intricate changes occur in microscopic size scales

and exhibits the property or the behavior that short term entropy reductions can occur at the microscopic size scale that this has really been known for a century or so.

In fact, these kinds of things were pointed out by "Maxwell" 30 years ago.

So in terms of actually violating the second law in a real practical sense, the work by "Evans" doesn't really speak to that point.

The work was very good.

There's no question it was it was just good, solid, experimental work with the confirmed theoretical predictions.

Very well

but in terms of making any kind of practical device or even a theoretical or theoretically interesting device that would violate the second law,

it didn't really accomplish that, I don't think, because it demonstrated small systems can for short periods of time decrease entropy locally.

But in terms of being able to harness that for any kind of real practical use, No, because it doesn't achieve that.

Think of it this way.

If I have a box like this and ten molecules go in this box, they'll bounce around randomly and pretty much be on average spread out all through the box.

Would you agree with that?

Every once in a while, all these balls might just all bounce independently such that they all inhabit one little corner of the box.

So it would look as if the entropy of the gas in the box spontaneously decreased against the second law.

That's what it would look like.

And you can you could claim that, in fact, the entropy of these particles all in one corner of the box is less than spread out over the box.

Certainly.

But you could not have predicted when that was going to occur.

There was no necessarily good way of harnessing that.

It was just a statistical fluctuation that caused it.

So the statistical fluctuations have been known for a century or more to cause these kinds of spontaneous entropy decreases.

Nonetheless, they don't really constitute a useful energy source

-this was for one period of time

by microseconds probably or tens of seconds at most, something like that.

I think there is a need to a degree for scientific orthodoxy.

It's necessary for science to hold certain standards in terms of truth.

If you did and if you say anything went, science would be in the same shape as the Internet, which is basically just

-the Wild West.

And so you don't want that.

But at the same time, you would expect some sort of a good degree of inquisitiveness, curiosity, intellectual honesty in the scientific community,

which seems to have been lacking in the discussion of the second law.

There seem to be a lot of kneejerk reaction, a lot of unscientific attitudes toward it,

which are dismissive rather than inquisitive or intellectually honest,for that matter.

The shortest review I ever got on a journal article which I submitted, I could paper my walls with rejections from the journals.

The shortest one was "This article violates the second law. Do not publish it."

And that was it.

That was the entire review by the reviewer that was accepted by the editors, conclusive proof that it had to be wrong and it was rejected.

That is not science.

That's intellectual fascism.

So on one hand, I can appreciate orthodoxy, but at the same time, scientists should be aware of their own ignorance,

which is that no one knows why the second law always works.

Nobody knows why, you can't prove the second law.

It's an experimentally observed fact for now.

But to refuse to admit the possibility that it can be violated is completely unscientific

because it basically throws out the idea of the falsifiability of the law, which is absolutely necessary for the health of any intellectual enterprise.

You have to always admit the possibility that you're wrong if you're unwilling to do that.

You really have no right, no real possibility of ever really being right.

But there's always something to be discovered.

I don't think there's any end science or to learning.

And anybody who claims that there's an end to science or that they have a general theory of everything,

I think should be stripped of their Ph.D. and thrown out of science.

+And what was that, well, you had earlier a guy who said, we already know everything we need to know, all we need to do is fill in the decimal points

+and that was what, 1900?

just before quantum mechanics started

i'd have to look it up. And it was something like physics is now officially dead.

All that is required now is to fill in decimal points, something like that.

But I think that was "Jeanne's". I'm not certain of that. I think it was "Jeanne's"

+what's important about that ¿?The illustration of the attitude

the arrogance, but you see it now quite a bit in the string theorists.

And I shouldn't, just the string theorists, and certain scientists who claim that they're about to have a theory of everything

or a grand unified theory that will that will explain everything.

I find that offensive intellectually, because you can always ask the question, am I missing something?

So to make a claim that you have a theory now that answers all possible questions is to cut off for the questioning.

Once you've done that, you've committed intellectual suicide.

And I think that is the greatest thing that you create.

I think that is just about the greatest, if not the greatest sin that you can commit as a scientist is to stop your questioning.

I think "Max Planck" said it best.

He said, You never really, how should I put it?

Old ideas never really die.

It's the proponents of those ideas who die.

It's only then that scientific revolutions take hold.

So I started this work in my early 30s I'm 45 now.

I expect to live another 50 years. I'm simply going to outlive the bastards.