Second law of thermodynamics BROKEN !

One of the most fundamental rules of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, has for the first time been shown not to hold for microscopic systems.

The demonstration, by chemical physicists in Australia, could place a fundamental limit on miniaturisation, because it suggests that the micro-scale devices envisaged by nanotechnologists will not behave like simple scaled-down versions of their larger counterparts - they could sometimes run backwards.

The second law states that a closed system will remain the same or become more disordered over time, i.e. its entropy will always increase. It is the reason a cup of tea loses heat to its surroundings, rather than being heated by the air around it.

"In a typical room, for example, the air molecules are most likely to be distributed evenly, which is the overall result of their individual random motion", says theoretical physicist Andrew Davies of Glasgow University. "But because of this randomness there is always a probability that suddenly all the air will bunch up in one corner." Thankfully this probability is so small it never happens on human timescales.

www.newscientist.com...


[Edited on 9-9-2002 by mad scientist]

i saw this a while ago. i would like to stress - as a physicist - that TII isn't technically broken by this discovery. anybody who deals with quantum mechanics knows that you must be wary of applying macroscopic laws - such as TII - to quantum situations. the only real news in this article is that they've managed to estimate a scale upon which its breaks down.

- qo.

Very good topic mad scientist!!!Indeed there are cases where the entropy does not increase!But theyare very-very rare.You know that entropy is a measure of disorder ,for example the expansion of the universe and more generally of the space -time is a matter of the increase of disorder or the entropy!Or more mathematically S=KlnB ,very usefull formula !!!