Maxwell's demon

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Re: Maxwell's demon

Postby Starfire » Wed Dec 26, 2012 4:21 pm

I just love the thrust of the arguements in this thread.


Wonder if both could be wrong? :roll: and it could be quantum
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Re: Maxwell's demon

Postby Doug Coulter » Thu Jan 24, 2013 1:25 pm

We're getting closer to mainstream acceptance of my thinking, and closer to a diode that would make plan A workable:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/ ... -ac-to-dc/
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Re: Maxwell's demon

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Feb 27, 2013 10:40 am

Ah, here's my diode. Maybe I can learn to make these:
http://phys.org/news/2013-02-patented-f ... solar.html

Field emission diode, DC to literally daylight - they are talking the solar application, foreshadowed a long time ago in Robert Heinlein's "Douglass-Martin solar rectifiers".

FieldEmissionDiode.jpg
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Re: Maxwell's demon

Postby Doug Coulter » Tue Jan 28, 2014 11:13 pm

Yet more people are thinking about this, those with "credentials" are now saying I was right all along. This is not a new experience (gloat). It's been my lifelong habit to look at things differently, and question assumptions, which often enough, are either wrong, or more often - oversimplified, as the 2nd law's unstated assumptions are. While everything might be equipartitioned in say, a big mass of hot stuff - all 6 degrees of freedom used...it's not always the case, particularly when you get near the fuzzy boundary of classical vs quantum. Here, some guys have "proved" it with simulations. They went smaller than I had in mind, there's still some catching up to do - but...
http://phys.org/news/2014-01-nanoscale- ... it.html#ms

The critical pic:
nanoscaleheatenginecarnotlimit.jpg
Well?



Do use a browser with an ad blocker if you have the choice. They kinda are overboard with that stuff. These guys modeled what might happen if the "hot" side of a carnot engine wasn't thermally hot, but had a non-thermal energy distribution. Kinda like - a bullet doesn't have to be hot to carry energy, since nearly all of its energy is concentrated along one axis. Obvious in hindsight, but not so much if you're stuck in classical thinking.

It's one of my main whinges about science these days (but only one). SM may conflict with Gen relativity - we know there's an issue. But to me the real issue is that all our theories so far are post-descriptive, not predictive. We've not even solved the 3 body gravitational problem feed-forward so far, much less things like "I have a set of specs, what material might meet them from a first principles point of view" perspective.
Nope, all you can do is build a computationally expensive model, and monte-carlo your way through that. And hope to get lucky with the try you feed in.

So, yet again, academia will grab credit for something I thought of a decade ago. Good for them, I hope someone gets off their butt and just builds one. Then maybe I can claim prior art and steal their work back, since it wasn't truly their idea. Naw, I don't actually care, just think it's a funny old world.
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Re: Maxwell's demon

Postby Doug Coulter » Sat Jan 20, 2018 10:53 am

Nah, I wasn't right all along </s> - but I'll be right when they catch up. They still don't understand that it's any nonlinearity that breaks the oversimplified 2nd law, but they're getting there - with full credit given to themselves, of course.
I'm just a crackpot who knows diddly about how the universe works, right? Because I didn't pay to get paper credentials, I therefore can't know anything much.

https://phys.org/news/2018-01-efficiency.html

I have a really funny book around here somewhere, math-laden as heck - probably sold negative copies or near-zero due to the maxim "every equation cuts your sales in half". Called "Molecular engineering", by Henry A McGee Jr if you're interested. The whole first half of the book pedantically, no, that's not the right word - religiously - states there are zero exceptions to the 2nd law - every condition with energy has it equi partitioned into all degrees of freedom. What makes me roll on the floor laughing is that the second part of the book is all about lasers - which require a population inversion to happen, eg, a non-maxwellian and non equal distribution of states...Of course it all evens out eventually, but in the meantime...interesting things can happen...

I'm surprised the cognitive dissonance hasn't exploded some heads, but I'd bet they don't even see the contradiction.

Why do I even care? Because it's this misconception that my fusion plan is based on. The equating of a temperature (2nd law equidistribution of energy into all degrees of freedom) that's totally overused is just dead wrong. A bullet doesn't have to be hot - can even be at one millikelvin or less - and still kill you.
Hoping random kinetic energy on deuterons is going to efficiently push a bunch close enough together for long enough for the probability of tunneling into fusion (via the strong force we have no control over directly) is a pretty thin hope. Shooting them directly at one another seems a more obvious way to achieve that, does it not?

Yet plenty of physicists (especially those with degrees working in fusion) will equate the energy in that bullet to a temperature...as if it was flying around in all directions at once, while spinning around all 3 axes. Yeah, that's the ticket.

It's not hard to show that being thermalized wastes *at least* 5/6 of your input energy, and it's actually worse when you're trying for collisions because two things moving fast but side by side won't collide at all (and all the sub sets of that sort of thing also). So, good luck, plasma guys...maybe you can make it work, and I'll applaud if you pull it off, but I think it will merely "annoy the pig". Your bear will never be a ballet dancer, but it'll be cool if it dances at all, fer sure.

Now, that's not the only trick I think I may have up my sleeve here - I've told a few people about the other one. They've mostly been pretty nice to me about it, unlike the science community as a whole who laughed at my theoretic ability to violate "what everyone knows" - the 2nd law. Which they are now taking credit for violating in just the way I predicted would be possible, though they haven't built anything yet as far as I know that's practical with it and don't seem to be getting the basic understanding right even now. But we'll give them another decade or two to forget about this crackpot that embarrassed them all. If they even paid attention, which most of them probably didn't - I'm sure my writings to that community mostly went into a round file.

I found out that when consulting, if it's your idea, it's crap. Wait a few months and the customer, having forgotten where they heard it, has the same idea and it's like it came from heaven, let's do that. Seems that phenomenon of humans is more universal than I thought...

Pardon a crusty old fart in the morning...I musta gotten out of the bed on the wrong side before I saw theft of my work. Which probably wasn't even theft - most of what I see in the science press is people thinking they invented something I have musty old books describing...blind leading the blind, as if all history didn't matter. Or the parts that are too hard to learn. Obviously they don't miss Archimedes and try to prove that all over again...The rest - well, people graduate and need grants and stuff, so they invent things to get grants for, knowing that the grant givers don't know history either.
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Re: Maxwell's demon

Postby johnf » Wed Jan 24, 2018 12:55 am

what gives try to upload a thesis I had something to do with and
drat.jpg

But will try again with pdf in next reply
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Re: Maxwell's demon

Postby johnf » Wed Jan 24, 2018 12:57 am

seems it worked this time

thesis_fulltext.pdf
(6.53 MiB) Downloaded 358 times
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Re: Maxwell's demon

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Jan 24, 2018 10:33 am

The site is often picky about filetypes, but also the ISP has had a few issues here and there...I've been letting them know. PHPBB itself run as a local instance here on a pi - so I can use it to keep notes, won't let me upload some kinds of files, even though I explicitly went through a rather convoluted process documented by them to allow just that. Oh well.

Yes, the nano diode is the kind of nonlinearity probably most suited to any initial work at near room temperatures and taking advantage of things like Brownian motion - which in turn is just realization that if you flip a coin enough times it's going to come up heads a few times in a row now and then...(or tails, or in this case, we have more degrees of freedom, but you get the idea).
I keep trying to come up with something that'll make you rich...I know you do that nano-pointy stuff ;) The smaller you can make this, the better it works for a few reasons when thinking of Brownian types of stuff. It's more likely to get a few atoms all going the same way - takes fewer "heads in a row", than for more. Also, it's faster, and the fewer particles, the faster things happen (lower mass) and the less trouble it'd be to collect the field change from a moving Brownian magnet, for example - less metallization layers in your chip to wind the coils - I think it was a few GHz you needed. IIRC, the last time I touched the math for this you could get a magnetic domain in around 100 atoms or a little more, that's the lower limit- this would move pretty fast so wouldn't need high inductance in your surrounding 3 axis coils to pick up the broadband RF and rectify it with one of those slick diodes (so you could series-parallel a bunch to get to the level of something you could measure or use).

Other examples I've seen where no one realized what was going on was a selection process where someone made an array of dipoles tuned to "green" - while trying to do something else photonic/magic and then wondered why it emitted tons of green light when only sub-red hot during processing. That "antenna array" - which isn't a nonlinearity as such, but IS a selection process - simply radiated off the tail of the distribution (Boltzmann? I have trouble remembering who re-named the Gaussian for their special use sometimes) - which was then refilled by the normal random processes the 2nd law is so proud of - and dependent on.

It's a wonder some heads haven't exploded. Steven Hawking predicted the evaporation of black holes, which for example are one of the bigger theorized nonlinearities in the universe. Someone didn't connect the dots there?

So here's yet another example - and the answer is actually 42(!).
http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a ... ss-energy/
Not gonna beat that with fusion! On the other hand, fusion seems like it might be easier than making/handling a black hole by a good margin.

I'm going to have to look into this now somewhat official "generalized 2nd law" and see if they're getting that right yet. Before, I was laughed out of court. One of the reasons this site exists is to show prior art, not that I really care that much for this one - but rats, some of those pompous asses^H^H^H^H^H academics ought to at least toss an "I'm sorry" or something my way. Of course it won't happen.

I'm sure lots of cavemen worked on wheel-like things before someone got the tech right as well as the science and became the wheel guy. Probably fire too...
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Re: Maxwell's demon

Postby Doug Coulter » Mon Feb 05, 2018 12:23 pm

Here's another lawbreaker: https://phys.org/news/2018-02-diode-ult ... =item-menu

Seems I wasn't full of whatever they said after all. What was intuition is now fact.
I only bang on about this so much because it relates heavily to my approach to creating fusion, which also isn't thermal...
That appears to be another place where misuse of the 2nd law leads to misleading opinions of that "that can't be done" sort.
Nice I was at least partly right. We'll be seeing about the rest pretty soon.
Now I'll stop patting myself on the back, it's wearing out my arm...and I have other uses for it.
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Re: Maxwell's demon

Postby Doug Coulter » Sat Apr 20, 2019 4:45 pm

There's no end of validation that I was right, even some I don't actually understand - not sure of this one.
https://phys.org/news/2019-04-thermodyn ... nergy.html
But it's one of many now being touted out there, some even have real results and replicate.

I do (and always did) maintain that the 2nd law is valid with the assumptions it was made under.

It's just that there was no thought of any nonlinearity or selection mechanism when it was written, and those things surely exist.
Even space-time is nonlinear (As far as we can guess) near a mass or energy - black holes being the limiting case.
Any resonant system is a selector. For nonlinear I give you any diode. (there are more examples of course).

And of course, no one remembers telling me how full of it I was when I predicted this either ;~}.
If you wait long enough, the other guy forgets hearing your idea and thinks he came up with it himself; then it's all good, right?

The canary tweets.
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