Sorry Chris, the actual universe, via observations, says you're wrong about this one. The magnet/brownian scheme requires no temperature drop
between its parts to work, just a temperature above 0k for the working fluid, though it obviously works better at higher temperatures where the kinetic energy density per atom is higher. There have now been peer-reviewed real papers on it, 40 years or so after I started taking crap for suggesting it was possible. Now that it's "their idea", it's fine.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-lan ... rased.htmlYou're not of course refuting that there is thermal noise in any resistance or impedance that has nothing whatever to do with heat moving from place to place (at least not in and out of the impedance). It's there because heat is there, period, with the jiggling creating non uniform electron distributions and thus, a signal. If you had a perfect rectifier, you could even take energy out of that system without putting any heat back into it - and the resistor would cool as a result. It's just that it's not a lot of power there - enough to be an effect in preamps, but not power a flashlight. It's just not the best way to get power - the brownian is better, and can be optimized re the weight ratio of the magnet vs the atoms in the fluid, as well as for a particular band of frequencies most of the motion energy will land in.
No, Maxwell's demon only needs to expend the energy required to tell between hot and cold. That need not be the entire energy of the system, that's an oversimplification of the 2nd law that is just wrong - but widely disseminated in lower school science books (and self appointed academics who haven't actually looked hard enough at it). It needn't "bat" anything at all - it need only open or close a door, for example. Each of those things theoretically need only take one quanta at the Planck scale, and an atom can have a hell of a lot more energy than that in kinetic energy at room temperature.
Remember that correctly stated, the second law deals only with "on average" - and in the absence of coherence or non linearities. If you have a non linearity or skimming-selector, you're not cheating it, you're getting in the back door. Then the "on average" part actually helps you by restoring the tails of the distribution you stole...starting from of course, a lower total energy since you've skimmed some off.
This happens naturally every time a water molecule evaporates and some in the same glass don't - because in the Maxwell distribution of energies there are tails that extend out forever - they get small far from the middle of the gaussian to be sure, but they are there and non zero nevertheless. And you know what, the remaining water is chilled, that's where the energy came from. Freeze drying comes to mind as something you can try at home in a vacuum system as an example of this. If at some temperature, everything was moving the same speed, none of this would work - but that's not reality, reality has a distribution of speeds.
In this case, the "door" is merely the surface binding energy of the bulk liquid - a barrier you can either tunnel through or not (just like DD fusion). If a particular atom has more than that much energy, it will always break that barrier and free itself, if less, only sometimes. But due to it carrying off energy - the water left behind is cooler than before. Which is where the energy came from. No free.
This is one of the very things you yourself complain about - dogma stopping good ideas in science from being investigated. You're spewing it now. Of course, none of this will ever be major power source - the energy density is just too low to get tons of power out of chilling stuff from room temperature (and depending on the normal direction of entropy to reheat it from environmental sources). But in some cases, a little power is worth the hassle this would entail.
In fact, I tried to get the magnet thing made by a semi fab (LTC's, since I have a friend there). They looked it over and their scientists thought it would work, but not be profitable, so I couldn't get it done.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.