You can't win thermodynamics, expressed in english, win, break even, quit, argument by analogy, spillover effect, assumption, violations, counterexamples, faith From http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/11/02/free-energy-from-air-sorry-no/
The laws of thermodynamics can, non-mathematically, be sumarized [sic] as: "You can’t win", "You can’t even break even", and "You can’t quit the game".
But Raizen says:
[...] we showed that the corresponding increase in the entropy of the light exactly balanced the entropy reduction of the atoms [...]
So you can break even, at least. --- Another researcher, Daniel Steck at the University of Oregon, says:
"Our one-way barrier acts to put all the atoms into a subsection of the original container. In essence this is the same as the original demon, since the point is that the demon can apparently reduce the entropy of the gas," Steck told physicsworld.com.
--- A magnifying glass shows you can win. I can't start a fire; I use a magnifying glass to turn sunlight into enough heat to start a fire. I won. I got more energy out of my actions and the glass than I put in. I got more usable energy out of the sunlight than was in it before it went through the glass. The universe also "wins": Dark Energy, the Big Bang, General Relativity don't need or violate conservation laws. You "quit the game" by building on top of thermodynamic machines. So, a computer requires much less power to create games I want to play, than a steam engine. The thermodynamic considerations in a computer exist, but they play a very small part of the final work produced by a computer program. The information content is many orders of magnitude more important than the thermodynamics. Writing a game represents much more work than the thermodynamics can describe. The work is intellectual, information-related, not moving a mass against a force. We are using smaller and smaller amounts of thermodynamic work to produce more and more knowledge, more and more games we choose to play. We can "quit" any game we don't want to play. The blogger linked at the beginning is neglecting to specify the assumptions of thermodynamics, which include: no scale effects, no quantum effects, and no relativistic effects. Thermodynamic laws apply only within a very limited range of physical phenomena, mainly related to the steam engine. Stating the laws in natural language as the blog author did makes it easy to spill it over, to use it as an analogy for political policies or economics. For example: if you create money, you can't get more out of it than you put in would seem to be a natural analog of the first law. But banks violate this principle every day:
From Economics of Money and Banking, Part I, Lecture 5-5 "Correspondent Banking Bilateral Balances", from about 5:11 to 5:32:
Bank A is saying "I owe you a thousand dollars", Bank B is saying "No I owe you a thousand dollars." They both owe each other a thousand dollars. So they've created these deposits from thin air, they're just a swap of IOUs; they've expanded their balance sheets - both of them. How can that possibly do anything? You know - there's no such thing as a free lunch, it seems like it couldn't possibly do anything. But it does.
Instead of sitting on his hind quarters "proving" with circular reasoning* that a perpetual motion machine can't exist, that blogger should be trying to falsify his prediction by figuring out how it could. (In his example, can you harvest energy from the car's breaks to compress gas? Can you capture wind energy, as the car rolls downhill?) That's what good scientists like Steck (quoted above) try to do. --- * According to wikipedia: Popper writes, "I approached the problem of induction through Hume. Hume, I felt, was perfectly right in pointing out that induction cannot be logically justified." (Conjectures and Refutations, p. 55)