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The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy -- sometimes thought of as disorder -- of a system cannot decrease over time. One of the consequences of this law is that it precludes the possibility of a perpetual motion device. Around 1870, James Clerk Maxwell proposed a thought experiment in which a demon could open and close a gate between two chambers of gas, allowing warmer atoms to pass in one direction and cooler atoms to pass in the other. This sorting, which required no energy input, would result in a reduction of entropy in the system and a temperature difference between the two chambers that could be used as a heat pump to perform work, thus violating the second law.
"Later work has shown that the demon doesn't actually violate the second law and subsequently there have been many attempts to devise experimental systems that behave like the demon," said [physics professor David] Weiss. "There have been some successes at very small scales, but we've created a system in which we can manipulate a large number of atoms, organizing them in a way that reduces the system's entropy, just like the demon."
The researchers use lasers to trap and cool atoms in a three-dimensional lattice with 125 positions arranged as a 5 by 5 by 5 cube. They then randomly fill about half of the positions in the lattice with atoms. By adjusting the polarization of the laser traps, the researchers can move atoms individually or in groups, reorganizing the randomly distributed atoms to fully fill either 5 by 5 by 2 or 4 by 4 by 3 subsets of the lattice.
"Because the atoms are cooled to almost as low a temperature as possible, the entropy of the system is almost entirely defined by the random configuration of the atoms within the lattice," said Weiss. "In systems where the atoms are not super-cooled, the vibration of the atoms makes up the majority of the system's entropy. In such a system, organizing the atoms does little to change the entropy, but in our experiment, we show that organizing the atoms lowers the entropy within the system by a factor of about 2.4."
(Score: 2, Touché) by bob_super on Monday September 10 2018, @11:02PM (2 children)
We are one bullet, or one KFC leg, away from the reduced entropy of President Pence.
Would you really like to find yourself in that state ? (Abort, Retry, Fail)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 11 2018, @01:12AM
VP may be a zealot, but he's a sane zealot. (At least as close as a zealot can come to being sane.)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by vux984 on Tuesday September 11 2018, @06:25AM
Yes. At least he'd give us some peace and quiet and the rest of the world would be able to rely on the US, and the rest of the government would be able to rely on the white house. Most of the the real policy work going on in government wouldn't change - same deregulation push, same immigration nonsense, same supreme court picks, same bullshit, but the signal to noise ratio would get a lot better. Hell, at this point, I think Palin would have been a better president.