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Frontiers of the Second Law

Moderator: Seth Lloyd
Adrian Bejan '71, SM '72, PhD '75 Bjarne Andresen Miguel Rubi Signe Kjelstrup David Jou Miroslav Grmela Lyndsay Gordon Eric Schneider George N, Hatsopoulos '49, SM '50, ME '54, SCD '56: October 4, 2007; Running Time: 1:28:28

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

These nine panelists describe ways in which the Second Law of Thermodynamics can be stretched, or applied in less traditional ways. Adrian Bejan has constructed a law that “covers every configuration in physics, from animate, to inanimate, to us, the societal." Bejan demonstrates how his law describes and predicts the tree-shaped flow of all rivers, animal locomotion and human settlement distribution. With it, says Bejan, “thermodynamics becomes a science of systems with configuration…”

Bjarne Andresen acknowledges “many fights about the Second Law,” before declaring his belief that “entropy survives as a concept, and applies equally in the chemistry lab, to the quantum computer and to black holes.” He discusses the importance of carefully defining the system under examination beforehand, “otherwise you get into fights with your neighbors."

Miguel Rubi discusses how to use the Second Law to extract information about the evolution of small systems. Unlike “canonical thermodynamics,” which describe systems in terms of energy, volume and mass, mesoscopic thermodynamics focuses on systems in terms of positions and movement of particles. Some examples of processes explicable by this kind of thermodynamics include the translocation of ions, RNA unfolding under tension, and muscular contractions.

Signe Kjelstrup argues that mesoscopic nonequilibrium thermodynamics (MNET) can address a longstanding problem in classical nonequilibrium thermodynamics, by addressing “activated processes.” Biological systems have heat flow, says Kjelstrup, and “that is as of yet not included in the description of enzyme kinetics. It should be there to quantify lost work in these important systems.”

“An important question arising in nonequilibrium thermodynamics is not just entropy but temperature,” says David Jou, in particular, “the physical meaning of temperature.” Jou invokes the extended thermodynamics of viscoelastic systems, and looks for a simple model valid for a modest range of equations.

Miroslav Grmela suggests that any time one goes from details to some kind of pattern, “there is an entropy involved…by providing some kind of dissipation, some pattern recognition process.” Grmela believes that thermodynamics … “find a natural formulation in the setting of contact geometry.”

Lyndsay Gordon’s talk involves Maxwellian valves. He discusses “a machine based on an osmophoretic engine,” a simple system with a liquid membrane, solvent and solute, “that is fluctuating completely forever,” without information. “This thing goes by itself,” he says.

Eric Schneider discerns “laws of ecology” in such gradient systems as the energy flow between the sun and earth. “We can determine “…heat and entropy production in the system,” as well as “ecological successions and directional processes that directly tie them to Darwinian evolution.” He advises his colleagues “to encourage policy makers to use exergy analyses on future energy development projects.”

Symposium organizer George Hatsopoulos wraps up by noting “that as far as I know in thermodynamics, there is no statement that says the Second Law implies the increase of entropy. The Second Law only says that the entropy cannot decrease, but there’s nothing wrong with entropy staying put.” We have evidence that in some cases it appears the entropy increases, but that’s not the “Second Law.”

Lecture Details

Location: Broad Institute

About the Speakers

Moderator: Seth Lloyd

Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Systems, Engineering Systems Division, MIT

Seth Lloyd received a Ph.D. in Physics from Rockefeller University, under the supervision of Heinz Pagels.

He was a postdoctoral fellow in the High Energy Physics Department at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with Murray Gell-Mann on applications of information to quantum-mechanical systems. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked at the Center for Nonlinear Systems on quantum computation. Since 1988, Lloyd has also been an adjunct faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute.
br> Lloyd is a principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He has performed seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communications, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, demonstrating the viability of quantum analog computation, proving quantum analogs of Shannon's noisy channel theorem, and designing novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduction.

Lloyd is a member of the American Physical Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Adrian Bejan '71, SM '72, PhD '75

J. A. Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Duke University

Bjarne Andresen

Professor of Physics, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen

Miguel Rubi

Professor of Physics, University of Barcelona

Signe Kjelstrup

Professor of Physical Chemistry, Norwegian Institute of Science and Technology

David Jou

Professor of Physics,University of Catalonia

Miroslav Grmela

Researcher, Department of Chemical Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal

Lyndsay Gordon

Author, "The Decrease in Entropy via Fluctuations," Entropy

Eric Schneider

Co-Author, Into the Cool

George N, Hatsopoulos '49, SM '50, ME '54, SCD '56

Chairman, American DG Energy

George N. Hatsopoulos is also the founder and CEO of Pharos, LLC, an organization devoted to the creation of leading edge business ventures, and the founder and chairman emeritus of Thermo Electron Corporation, where he served as Chairman and CEO from its founding in 1956 until his retirement from those positions in 1999.

Hatsopoulos has served on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, including a term as chairman. He was a member of the SEC Advisory Committee on Capital Formation and Regulatory Process, the Advisory Committee of the US Export-Import Bank, and the boards of various corporations and institutions.

Hatsopoulos is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and other scientific and technical organizations. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards in engineering, science, industry and academics, has authored over 60 articles in professional journals, and is the principal author of textbooks in Thermodynamics and Thermionic Energy Conversion.

Hatsopoulos has been a faculty member and senior lecturer at MIT and continues his association with the Institute as a Life Member of the Corporation and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Committee. Hatsopoulos holds a bachelors degree from the National Technical University of Athens, and masters and doctorate degrees from MIT.