exchemist

I said: "And yes, an engine rejecting less waste heat than the prediction of the Carnot efficiency limit would violate a physical "law" of the universe." To which you responded: "Where is your experimental proof of this? That is a stupid response. The Second Law of thermodynamics is - so far as we can tell - a physical law of the universe and the Carnot limit results directly from it. Ergo an engine rejecting less heat that the Carnot limit would violate a law of the universe. It's not a matter of experiment. It's a matter of definition. Trouble is, you are not engaged in "scientific enquiry". If only you were. You have an idée fixe, which you have had for a decade now. You spend your time doing pisspot "experiments" in your garage in a hopelessly unscientific way, while determinedly refusing to learn basic science and instead scrabbling around for bizarre and inconsistent justifications for your refusal to accept the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You are tilting at windmills.

In space, no one can hear you talk ballocks.

Ah, but the trouble is that, in your mounting hysteria, you are not reading what I posted. All I said was that if an engine were, somehow, to achieve a greater efficiency than the limit predicted by the Carnot formula, then it would break one of the laws of thermodynamics. That is a true statement that requires no testing, as it is just a matter of applying the 2nd law of thermodynamics to Carnot's cycle, i.e. simply an exercise in theory.

How about Prime Minister Liz Truss? 😄

No that is not all you said. You also spoke some gibberish about -10 being equal to +5 and started blithering about bricks and Hawaii. None of which has anything to do with the subject under discussion.

Do try to get a grip of your mind. You don't need to actually run a red traffic light to tell whether doing so would break the law. All you need do is read the law.

It would help if you would stop talking in riddles.

I think I'll hang a picture there..........FfzzzzBANG......

Obtaining elements from compounds, for example by reduction of their oxides, is chemistry. So you can make hydrogen by electrolysing water. Protium is a term for one isotope of hydrogen, the predominant one. The term is only used in contexts in which it is important to distinguish it from deuterium and tritium. In almost al chemistry this is not necessary, so we just call it hydrogen.

It was only fairly recently that I finally got clear the distinction between statistical thermodynamics, which I studied at university, and statistical mechanics. The two terms often seem to be used interchangeably. However, my understanding is the former is concerned with equilibrium processes, i.e. those in which one has an ensemble with a Boltzmann distribution among the available energy levels. Statistical mechanics is broader, embracing both equilibrium thermodynamics and non-equilibrium situations. When one is dealing with individual atoms, or things such as population inversions, it obviously makes little sense to apply concepts designed to describe equilibrium ensembles. (This is what we have in these regular, breathless pop-sci articles blithering on about "negative temperature", for example. Unless you have a Boltzmann distribution, you can't speak sensibly about temperature at all. )

Yes, the opening paragraph makes clear they only claim to beat the Carnot limit in a small number of non-equilibrium cases. The Carnot cycle, like just about all of classical physics and chemistry, is concerned with equilibrium thermodynamics, i.e. regimes in which concepts such as temperature have a meaning.

The pictures indicate this balloon has solar panels. So I'm not sure the plutonium story stacks up - unless for some reason it is the practice to provide both, which would seem to be a big weight penalty. But it makes sense to bring it down in shallow water for recovery and analysis of the bits, rather than have it smashed to smithereens after hitting the ground. No doubt the analysis will get used for political purposes, to put pressure on the Chinese.

Ah yes, the interociter! This Island Earth: the man on the screen (Exeter) with the "Tefal head", as one of my brothers described him, when we watched it in our teens.

"Game", "sport" and "entertainment" are your choice of negative words, not mine. All academic study is driven by the wish to learn more, the desire to acquire knowledge. Curiosity is one if the most fundamental signs of intelligence in the human race. It is largely a myth (though one beloved of ignorant politicians) that scientists are - or should be - motivated by the potential technological applications of their work. Most of what they do has no obvious application at all, at the time. It is only later when the structure of knowledge, to which they each have contributed a few bricks, may be able to find application through technology. Sometimes this happens quickly, sometimes it takes decades or never happens. Nobody can tell at the time they are doing their work.

Well if they can make it safe and allow you to paint over it with normal paint, it could be a good idea. Radiators are ugly, siting them is always a problem and they take up space. But, as some have pointed out, heat pumps give you a lot more heat per kWh of electricity, so I'm not sure how useful on a wide scale it will be.

Thanks. It's very interesting. One can see he was very nearly there. He was on the track of heat being due to motion of the molecules and was becoming sceptical of the idea of caloric being any sort of material fluid.

What about the link to your translation from Carnot that I asked you for?

Heat flow is caused by the natural spreading out - diffusion - of energy of random motion from areas with more (higher temperature) to areas with less(lower temperature). This is why it behaves in some respects like a fluid. Temperature is proportional to the average kinetic energy of the molecules in the body (E = 1/2 kT for each degree of freedom the molecule has, k being Boltzmann's constant). Because the motion is random, it cannot all be directed in one direction. We have already been through this. That is why there has to be waste heat. You actually agreed with this earlier in the thread. So, given that there has to be waste heat, it is not unreasonable to suppose there may be a minimum amount of it for a given situation. That is what Carnot's formula tells us.

That is actually very funny indeed, in the context of this thread.👍

I'll laugh if his house burns down.

That means three mass values, not three different types of mass. Mass is mass.

This passage of Carnot's that you are paraphrasing is very interesting. Can you provide a link to it so I can read what else he says?

Why learn science? The short answer is curiosity: curiosity about why phenomena in nature occur the way they do. The second part of your post seems to concern something rather different: technology. Technology is the application of science to the human world. But many people who study science don't do it because of a wish to apply it via technology. It is curiosity about nature that drives them.

Yes of course, we have known exactly why raising the temperature makes a gas (at constant pressure) expand, or alternatively why (at constant volume) its pressure goes up, for almost 200 years. Look up the kinetic theory of gases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_theory_of_gases . And yes, an engine rejecting less waste heat than the prediction of the Carnot efficiency limit would violate a physical "law" of the universe. This law arises from the statistics of large numbers of molecules, which again has been well understood for about 150 years, Maxwell and Boltzmann being the founding fathers, but subsequently further built on with the advent of quantum theory. Look up statistical thermodynamics (or statistical mechanics, of which statistical thermodynamics is a subset). To think that by tinkering in your garage you are going to overturn 200 years of well established physics, which you have not even bothered to find out about, is solipsistic and idiotic. (I blame the modern popular disease of suspicion of expertise and deference to stupidity - as reflected in modern US politics for instance. 😁)

Yes, cyanogen is mentioned in some of the articles about this.