Just a question

[BaalChatzaf]

Are there any folks on this board who cherish a hope in their hidden heart of hearts that the second law of thermodynamics is wrong? Are there any folks here who hope (if not believe) that a John Galt type will produce a perpetual motion machine? Just curious. Just asking.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

Are there any folks on this board who cherish a hope in their hidden heart of hearts that the second law of thermodynamics is wrong? Are there any folks here who hope (if not believe) that a John Galt type will produce a perpetual motion machine? Just curious. Just asking.

Ba'al Chatzaf

The point of John Galt really had nothing to do with an invention that converted atmospheric static electricity into virtually unlimited cheap electric power for human use and consumption. When they were torturing him they were not torturing him for his invention. The baddies in AS never knew shit about that! The only point of his invention was to establish for purposes of the story that Galt was a genius for the ages. This is the nature of fiction in literature. This is a fictional concrete. The duty of the reader is to abstract from that. The concrete is arbitrary per se and fictional but it's the logical abstraction that's important. One then takes that abstraction to real concretes thus verifying the correctness--the validity--of the abstraction.

--Brant

Ayn Rand never claimed to be a physicist--but that hasn't stopped all Randians from claiming to be physicists, not out of science but Objectivism--Jesus H. Christ!

[oklibrarian]

I know too much about physics to really hope for that. However, back in my college days I dated a physics/engineering double major who had grown up in a town with a nuclear plant, and who worked summers there as an intern. What I know about nuclear energy, waste disposal, etc would fit on the head of a pin, but in those pre-9/11 days he was able to show me around a surprising amount of the facility, and I was really impressed with the safety measures in place as well as the general level of expertise and professionalism. The Simpsons it wasn't. I realize there are issues with waste storage and disposal, but somehow today when I look back on that plant nestled on the bank of a river, surrounded by some truly stunning countryside, as well as all the nuclear plants I saw during my travels in europe, and compare those visions with what's currently happening in the gulf, I wonder if it's time to revisit nuclear power.

[BaalChatzaf]

I know too much about physics to really hope for that. However, back in my college days I dated a physics/engineering double major who had grown up in a town with a nuclear plant, and who worked summers there as an intern. What I know about nuclear energy, waste disposal, etc would fit on the head of a pin, but in those pre-9/11 days he was able to show me around a surprising amount of the facility, and I was really impressed with the safety measures in place as well as the general level of expertise and professionalism. The Simpsons it wasn't. I realize there are issues with waste storage and disposal, but somehow today when I look back on that plant nestled on the bank of a river, surrounded by some truly stunning countryside, as well as all the nuclear plants I saw during my travels in europe, and compare those visions with what's currently happening in the gulf, I wonder if it's time to revisit nuclear power.

It is way past time. Oil is a great lubricant and a chemical feed-stock for complex polymers. We really have to stop burning the stuff.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[rhartford]

Are there any folks on this board who cherish a hope in their hidden heart of hearts that the second law of thermodynamics is wrong? Are there any folks here who hope (if not believe) that a John Galt type will produce a perpetual motion machine? Just curious. Just asking.

Ba'al Chatzaf

In Praise of Probing Thought

I famous physicist, whose name I don't recall, was told by a famous physics Nobel Laureate, whose name I don't recall, that the laws of conservation of momentum and energy would make it impossible that a gamma ray emitted from a stationary nucleus could have an energy closer to the transition energy than the natural linewidth based on the transition time.

Rudolf Mossbauer found a way in 1957 and earned a Nobel prize.

[9thdoctor]

Are there any folks on this board who cherish a hope in their hidden heart of hearts that the second law of thermodynamics is wrong?

In 2006’s Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon includes fictional technology that violates the 2nd law, the same author mocked the idea in 1966’s The Crying of Lot 49. Do you think such things should be off-limits in fiction?

You know another problem with Atlas Shrugged? There's no way the general population of the US would sit through a 3 hour speech. Unless there's free beer, like how they did it in Cuba in the 60's. Galt's speech was broadcast out into fantasyland.

[Philip Coates]

> Are there any folks here who hope (if not believe) that a John Galt type will produce a perpetual motion machine? [bC]

It's not a perpetual motion machine. Neither are wind power or petroleum power. In those cases, as in the case of static electricity, all are ultimate produced by energy from the sun directly or indirectly over time interacting with the earth.

Why do I have to hear that silly claim repeated over decades?

[Brant Gaede]

Are there any folks on this board who cherish a hope in their hidden heart of hearts that the second law of thermodynamics is wrong?

In 2006's Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon includes fictional technology that violates the 2nd law, the same author mocked the idea in 1966's The Crying of Lot 49. Do you think such things should be off-limits in fiction?

You know another problem with Atlas Shrugged? There's no way the general population of the US would sit through a 3 hour speech. Unless there's free beer, like how they did it in Cuba in the 60's. Galt's speech was broadcast out into fantasyland.

That's not a novel problem. It was read. It would be a film or play problem.

My uncle in the late 1930s woke up to his still on radio to hear part of the original War of the Worlds Orson Wells' broadcast. "What guff!" he said, turning it off and going back to sleep.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

> Are there any folks here who hope (if not believe) that a John Galt type will produce a perpetual motion machine? [bC]

It's not a perpetual motion machine. Neither are wind power or petroleum power. In those cases, as in the case of static electricity, all are ultimate produced by energy from the sun directly or indirectly over time interacting with the earth.

Why do I have to hear that silly claim repeated over decades?

Widely diffused charged regions are in a higher state of entropy than the fields generated in channeled conductors (aka wires or beams). How do you get from higher entropy to lower entropy without doing work?

The second law of thermodynamics says that closed systems proceed from a lower entropy state to a higher entropy state with overwhelming probability.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[BaalChatzaf]

> Are there any folks here who hope (if not believe) that a John Galt type will produce a perpetual motion machine? [bC]

It's not a perpetual motion machine. Neither are wind power or petroleum power. In those cases, as in the case of static electricity, all are ultimate produced by energy from the sun directly or indirectly over time interacting with the earth.

Why do I have to hear that silly claim repeated over decades?

Capacitors cannot supply a steady electric current.

However a converter of sunlight to microwave electromagnetic energy could provide a current flow by way of a microwave receiver on the the ground.

Galt's machine was presumed to convert static electricity into current electricity. This will not work. Moving charges are required somewhere along the line.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Dragonfly]

Capacitors cannot supply a steady electric current.

However a converter of sunlight to microwave electromagnetic energy could provide a current flow by way of a microwave receiver on the the ground.

Galt's machine was presumed to convert static electricity into current electricity. This will not work. Moving charges are required somewhere along the line.

The electric field of the Earth's atmosphere is only approximately static, it can be considered as a leaky capacitor (the Earth has a negative charge and the atmosphere a positive charge) that is continually recharged by thunderstorms (which transport by lightning negative charge to the Earth) all over the world. It is possible to draw some power from the quasi-electrostatic field of the atmosphere, but to get some appreciable power you need huge constructions that are hundreds of meters high or alternatively tethered balloons with all their practical disadvantages and still a relatively low output. With constructions with a size of only a few meters you can only get microscopic currents, the energy density is just far too low and that's the end of it.

[BaalChatzaf]

With constructions with a size of only a few meters you can only get microscopic currents, the energy density is just far too low and that's the end of it.

Yup. Our best bet is paving North America was fast breeder reactors and find a way to tap into geothermal heat. Conversion of static electricity to current electricity is simply not feasible, as you point out.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[equality72521]

while i do not hope for it ( i do not know enough about this type of thing) I do know that the work of one of the greatest Americans ever is proving many old theories about electricity wrong. It is the work of the electric man himself Tesla. There has been strong headway in his work in the last decade and it is causing scientists to rethink everything that everyone said was crazy about Tesla's work. If i remember correctly he did say it could be done, so who knows maybe it can maybe it can't only time will tell if Galt's motor will come to be.

[BaalChatzaf]

while i do not hope for it ( i do not know enough about this type of thing) I do know that the work of one of the greatest Americans ever is proving many old theories about electricity wrong. It is the work of the electric man himself Tesla. There has been strong headway in his work in the last decade and it is causing scientists to rethink everything that everyone said was crazy about Tesla's work. If i remember correctly he did say it could be done, so who knows maybe it can maybe it can't only time will tell if Galt's motor will come to be.

Tesla was an etherist. There is no ether (or aether). And his theories did not lead to the disappearance of a navy cruiser either (Philadelphia Experiment -- so called). He did develop the theory and technology of alternating current and he is the true inventor of radio (not, as claimed, Marconi).

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Philip Coates]

> There is no ether (or aether).

Really? I hope you're not going to say the Michelson-Morley experiment disproved the existence of the ether.

Edited August 3, 2010 by Philip Coates

[BaalChatzaf]

> There is no ether (or aether).

Really? I hope you're not going to say the Michelson-Morley experiment disproved the existence of the ether.

The kind of aether that M and M assumed should have produced interference. No interference was observed, therefore the kind of aether that M and M assumed is not there. Aether drag was also eliminated by experiment (Fizeau). So if Aether exists it is not what M and M assumed it was. It is something else. But no one has observed any space filling substance and on top of that every prediction made using aether has been made without it. So for practical purposes, aether does not exist. The concept has been dropped out of physics. It is not needed to explain what is observed.

There are other cogent reasons for getting rid of the aether: 1. The planets to not heat up and slow down by going through this magical space goo which is stiffer than steal and rarer than virtue. 2. The space goo has no properties accounted for in any the theories that pertain to matter. 3. Aether is an ad hoc to account for wave propagation through space. It is not needed. We have photons to do that.

Physics is well rid of the concept in terms of what is currently known about light transmission through unoccupied space (unoccupied by bodies).

So I am telling you the Aether beloved by 19th century physics has as much existences as the Holy Ghost in the Trinity.

Ba'al Chatzaf