from the Who-ordered-this? dept.
A group of Australian scientists has published experiments demonstrating that microscopic systems (such as a nanomachine) followed for short time periods (as long as a second) could sometimes violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that is, they extract useable energy from the temperature of their surroundings. In so doing, these systems become spontaneously more ordered and entropy decreases, in violation of the second law. It has long been known that the second law is subject to statistical fluctuations in very small systems (a few molecules), but it is surprising that such fluctuations occur in systems microns in length followed for a second or more, systems containing many billions of atoms. It would appear that these results have implications for micron-sized molecular machine systems: how microbes and other cells function, and how nanomachines should be designed to take into account that they could run backwards for short periods. For a concise summary, see the AIP Bulletin of Physics News, Pushing the Second Law to the Limit