The importance of the new work is that this emergence of order can be controlled – a bit like the dealer stacking the deck. Once in a while, a shuffled pack of cards yields a royal flush, five ordered cards (10, J, Q, K, A) all in the same suit. Now, temporary violations of the Second Law can happen even in everyday experience. This would be impossible in our everyday world, but is made possible by the “non-local” nature of the quantum realm, where distant objects can be connected through entanglement, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”. That’s a bit like powering a refrigerator on one side of your kitchen using a cooling system on the other, without connecting the two. “What is most important,” he adds, “is that there is not any energy transfer between these two spots.” If the collisions are set up in a particular way, the team found, the entropy change can become locally negative – meaning the particles are in a more ordered state when they come out than when they go in.Īs Vinokur explains, this local violation simply means that the entropy decreases in one particular place, while increasing in another.
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They then use it to calculate the entropy changes for a series of thought experiments involving the collision of particles, such as electrons and neutrons.
The new work leads to a quantum version of Maxwell’s demon.įirst, Vinokur and his team describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics in quantum terms. This would heat the warm room and cool the cold one. The Second Law (and common sense) says that if you open a door between the two, the temperature will eventually even out between them.īut, by opening and closing the door at just the right moment, “Maxwell’s demon” could allow only the warmest molecules to leave the cold room. It involved a little demon working as a gatekeeper between two rooms, one hot and one cold. In 1867, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell thought up a somewhat fantastical way to do it. Physicists, as is their wont, have been thinking of ways to break the law for more than 150 years with the practical application of making a perpetual motion machine. And it’s possibly what drives forward the arrow of time. It describes why some processes are irreversible (for example, why you can’t unscramble an egg). The Second Law is actually one of the most profound laws of nature. Physics isn’t broken, and the result hinges on the weirdness of quantum mechanics. The work “could make possible a local quantum perpetual motion machine”, says Valerii Vinokur, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory and co-author on a study published in Scientific Reports.īut there is nothing to worry about, really. And if you start out with a neat desk in the morning, it will tend towards messiness as the day wears on.īut physicists, using quantum mechanics to describe particular scenarios of interacting particles where the order of the system increases, appear to have violated this rule, with big ramifications. Shuffle a fresh pack of cards, and its initial neat arrangement will get messed up. At root, that’s simply because there generally are a lot more messy states than neat states. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy (a measure of disorder) always increases. In physics terms, this is the equivalent of finding a river that flows uphill, or chucking an ice cube on the fire to fan the flame. Now, US and Russian physicists may have found a way to do just that. Isaac Asimov’s short story The Last Question follows the human race over a trillion-year quest to circumvent the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
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