Isaac Asimov’s short story The Last Question follows the human race over a trillion-year quest to circumvent the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Now, US and Russian physicists may have found a way to do just that.
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.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy (a measure of disorder) always increases. At root, that’s simply because there generally are a lot more messy states than neat states.
Shuffle a fresh pack of cards, and its initial neat arrangement will get messed up. And if you start out with a neat desk in the morning, it will tend towards messiness as the day wears on.
But 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.
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.
But there is nothing to worry about, really. Physics isn’t broken, and the result hinges on the weirdness of quantum mechanics.
The Second Law is actually one of the most profound laws of nature.
To read more, click here.