Second law violation? Let\'s ask Matt (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 23:16 (4698 days ago) @ David Turell

Granville Sewell has a paper which thinks the second law is violated on Earth. He is a U. Texas math professor:
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> http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/AML_3497.pdf-There's many problems with the paper, first, as a mathematician, he does provide an interesting analysis of the entropy equations, but his only real argument is this "...this has been noticed by relatively few people, no doubt because usually the special case of isotropic heat conduction or diffusion is assumed, ..." -What he means by this "assumption" is purely that diffusion is an assumption and only an assumption taken into the equation, and while mathematically this is true, the big difference between physics and mathematics is that physics is used to describe observed phenomenon. (Or at the least, phenomenon that we can experimentally observe in the near future.) There is no instance where diffusion doesn't happen in nature. In other words--there is no experimental counter-case to refute diffusion. It happens deterministically.-
The 2nd law is in effect in our own bodies; we have to eat. All life must consume energy; this energy either comes from the sun or comes from other creatures. All organisms lose 90% of that energy (on average) to just stay alive. Some creatures (deermice) literally can't stop eating for more than an hour. All life suffers from this to a greater or lesser extent. -Short of this, he doesn't actually provide a proof of any kind. He literally just points out what he calls an "assumption." -Second, many of his other arguments take leaps and bounds: a lack of entropy causes more "order" ie, computers and highways, ie, as if there's some direct causal connection between the 2nd law and the appearance of highways. This is absurd: If you compute the amount of energy it takes to build a highway (and ESPECIALLY a computer), MUCH more disorder is created in the world than by this seeming act of creating order. -A refrigerator is a prime example here: It works by using energy to get rid of heat and pumping it into the box. But it always takes more energy (resulting in entropy by burning coal, gas, or the decay of radioactive isotopes) to accomplish that cooling. The end result is that more disorder was created. -The final caveat is this: ALL life creates more disorder by its existence than is created in terms of "order." Life exists because of diffusion, not in spite of it. And I put "order" in quotes, because clearly the process is asymmetric. Energy pyramids in ecosystems invariably demonstrate that top predators have a lower population density than prey, and this jump is directly tied to trophic levels. (How close they are to the sun's energy.) There's 90% less individuals the further you get from the sun's energy in terms of chemical energy.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"