IPFS News Link • Science, Medicine and Technology
Nanoparticles found to violate second law of thermodynamics
• http://www.gizmag.com, By Heidi HoopesThe second law of thermodynamics is the one that makes perpetual motion machines impossible. It states that the entropy – the measure for the disorder of a system – of any isolated system cannot decrease spontaneously, with the system evolving towards the state of maximum entropy (favoring disorder). The team has shown that a nanoparticle trapped with laser light temporarily violates this law. This seeming violation of universal law is transient, something that the researchers first derived as a mathematical model of fluctuations expected at the nanoscale.