Re: Stick This In Your Pipe And Smoke It
Posted by Southern Man on Jul 19, 2002 at 08:23
(209.102.128.87)Re: Stick This In Your Pipe And Smoke It (DA Morgan)
Phew!!! You scared me there for a second. Violating the second law would be the same as saying 2+2 really equals 4.1. But the report doesn't really reflect what was found. It has long (very long) been known that entropy is a macro characteristic. Order can appear out of chaos for short times on small scales. Entropy can be thought of as a statistical event. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose but the house always wins.
The real story here is the application of that knowledge to nanotechnology. “Essentially, the smaller a machine is, the greater the chance that it will run backwards. It could be extremely difficult to control.” That’s the real insight. Difficult but that’s why you pay the engineers those big bucks.