Dear Morin,

Thanks immensely for providing that important reference.  Much appreciated.

A fundamental thing I've also run into is the beautiful hierarchies of symmetry approach by Leyton.  He has a book out, which is Michael Leyton, A Generative Theory of Shape, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2001.  I have the book ordered, and expect to receive it in about two weeks or so.  Leyton provides a new group theoretic approach to symmetry-breaking, and one that is the opposite of the conventional approach. In the conventional approach, symmetry-breaking causes a reduction in symmetry group, while in Leyton's approach it causes the creation of a larger symmetry group with an extra layer that nests the preceding group.

In fact, Leyton's work also applies directly to what can be perceived or even thought, and how it is perceived or thought.  Thus it rigorously applies to just such concepts, revealing that they contain infolded, denser information and finer included concepts.  Leyton's work has been applied in robotics, pattern recognition, software, etc. and it is experimentally validated.

We have also done a long-needed logical analysis on the hoary old concept of "perpetual motion is forbidden".  Here is a short synopsis.

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Summary: The professional skeptics are quite naïve when they forbid perpetual motion and also blast COP>1.0 for an electrical system as being perpetual motion machine stuff.  Perpetual (continuous) motion is not forbidden by the laws of physics, but is required!  In fact, a thing placed in motion remains in perpetual (continuous) motion (according to Newton's first law) until acted upon by an external force to change its motion (according to Newton's second law).

So in stating that perpetual motion itself is forbidden, the usual skeptic has inadvertently assumed that Newton's first two laws are false.  That of course is falling all the way back to Aristotle's original error in thinking that, to have a thing remain in motion, one had to continuously feed energy into it and do work on it, because it had to continuously expend work to keep moving.  That is flatly not true, of course, as any physicist today well knows.  For an object once in motion, to continue in perpetual (continuous) motion in an inertial frame does not require work to be done by the object and it requires no additional energy input to it.  Else we would have to throw out every high school and college sophomore physics book on earth, and most of physics is wrong.

Having made one great error by starting with a false premise, the skeptics then further compound the error.  A common but gross non sequitur then made by the skeptics is to --- erroneously --- equate the falsity ["perpetual (continuous) motion is forbidden"] with a truth ["continuous work without any energy input is forbidden"].  The second statement is true and doing work without any energy input is indeed impossible unless the system has infinite energy to begin with!

[However, here we point out that, in quantum field theory, any charge actually consists of an infinite bare charge in the center, clustered around by a screening infinite virtual charge of opposite sign.  The difference between the two infinite charge values is finite, and is the commonly observed "magnitude of the charge" seen and measured by the external observer.  So if we accept QFT, then the charge is able to violate the second "truth" statement because it has two infinite charge values which contain infinite energy, hence can continuously emit a finite rate of energy flow indefinitely.]

But for finite systems, violating the "truth" (second) statement would violate the conservation of energy law, of course, because energy would have to be created from nothing.  And so the second statement is quite true, at least for finite systems.  However, the logical non sequitur is in having first stated a falsity (perpetual motion is forbidden) and then equating that primary falsity as the latter truth (continuous work without necessary energy input is impossible), implying that the true second clause which everyone knows is true (for finite systems), proves the first false clause also to be true.

That gross illogical misinterpretation has been around a very long time, and it is astonishing that so many scientists and engineers and scientific journals and magazines continue to fall for it without even a passing thought.  E.g., here is Max Plank's erroneous statement of  the first law of thermodynamics:

"It is in no way possible, either by mechanical, thermal, chemical, or other devices, to obtain perpetual motion, i.e., it is impossible to construct an engine which will work in a cycle and produce continuous work, or kinetic energy, from nothing." [Max Planck, Treatise on Thermodynamics, 3rd ed., Dover, New York, 1945.]

There you see the falsity (first statement) equated to a truth (second statement), which thus is a non sequitur.  Planck's statement contains both a false premise and a non sequitur, as presented above, hence it falsifies itself by elementary logic.

Yet so far as I am aware, no one else seems to have challenged Planck's statement before, at least in logical analysis terms!

Also, in accepting the conventional classical Maxwell-Heaviside EM model, all the skeptics already accept (unwittingly) a model that assumes that every charge in the universe freely creates energy out of nothing at all, and continuously pours it out freely.  The model implicitly assumes that every EM field, potential, and every joule of EM energy in the universe was and is created --- from nothing at all --- this way, by the associated source charge(s). So as long as they unwittingly accept the creation of energy on a mind-boggling massive scale, from nothing at all, then the arch skeptics themselves are the greatest advocates in human history of forbidden continuously working machines without any energy input, with the machines creating energy from nothing at all.  And they are so naive that they do not even recognize it!

And then many skeptics erroneously equate coefficient of performance (COP) of COP>1.0, as being a forbidden working system without the necessary energy input!  That too is false; COP>1.0 merely means the environment puts in some of the input energy for free, so that what one gets out of the machine is greater than what the OPERATOR HIMSELF inputs to it.  The EFFICIENCY ratio expressed in percentage analyzes how much useful work output or energy output one gets for the TOTAL energy input from all sources.  That ratio is never greater than 100%, which would require a perfect system with no losses at all.  For a real system with losses, the efficiency of the system is always less than 100%.

On the other hand, COEFFICIENT OF PERFORMANCE evaluates the "cost versus benefit" to the operator for his own input (for his cost), regardless of what additional energy is freely input by the environment.  If the operator inputs nothing and the environment inputs all the required energy, then the system COP = infinity --- e.g., as for a windmill or a waterwheel or a solar cell.  The EFFICIENCY, however --- i.e., the useful output divided by the TOTAL energy input from all sources --- can never be greater than 100%.

So a common solar cell sitting in the sunlight may have only 17% efficiency, while its COP = infinity because the operator inputs none of the input energy at all.   A common home heat pump may have an efficiency of 50% or so, but a good one will have COP = 4.0 under nominal good conditions.  And so on.

90% of the electrical engineers and many scientists also are not really aware of the precise difference between efficiency and COP as stated above. I have had to correct quite a few persons on that very subject.  Many textbooks also sometimes confuse efficiency and COP.  No one in his right mind (except unwittingly the skeptics and conventional scientists not questioning the Maxwell-Heaviside theory!) advocates system efficiency of greater than 100%, since that really would require creation of energy from nothing!

But even on that, one has to deal with the great Hilbert's statement. Shortly after Einstein's theory of General Relativity was published, Hilbert wrote:

"I assert... that for the general theory of relativity, i.e., in the case of general invariance of the Hamiltonian function, energy equations... corresponding to the energy equations in orthogonally invariant theories do not exist at all.  I could even take this circumstance as the characteristic feature of the general theory of relativity."  [D. Hilbert, Gottingen Nachrichten, Vol. 4, 1917, p. 21.] 

As pointed out by Logunov and Loskutov,

"Unfortunately, this remark of Hilbert was evidently not understood by his contemporaries, since neither Einstein himself nor other physicists recognized the fact that in general relativity conservation laws for energy, momentum, and angular momentum are in principle impossible."

But since classical Maxwell-Heaviside theory erroneously assumes a flat spacetime, even when the local energy density in the system (and therefore in local spacetime) changes, then this characteristic in general relativity is not encountered in the standard EM engineering theory.  It also does not seem to have been adequately considered in thermodynamics as yet.

Leaving that possibility when spacetime is curved, we return to our analysis.

One can have COP>1.0 or even COP = infinity, and lots of systems already do.  But most critics, even accepting the windmill and waterwheel, then state that COP>1.0 is impossible for an electrical power system. That is a false premise and experimentally falsified already.

One simple experimental proof for EM devices having COP>1.0  is that little solar cell, with its efficiency of say 17% and its COP = infinity.  That means it wastes 83% of the energy it gets input to it by the sunlight, so it only outputs a useful 17% of what it receives.  But since the operator inputs nothing at all, then the amount of that 17% output divided by zero (operator input)  gives COP = infinity.  All that COP = infinity means, is that one gets all the energy input for free from the environment, and so whatever work output is done by the system is also for free, regardless of how much energy the system wastes.  The windmill, waterwheel, and sailboat have been doing that and exhibiting COP = infinity for many centuries.  The solar cell and the source charge do it for electromagnetic systems.

Also, the gauge freedom principle in quantum field theory requires that the potential energy of a system can be freely changed at will, at any time. (In the real world, one may have to pay a little switching costs, but that can be made efficient to minimize it).  It follows that by freely (or nearly freely) increasing the potential energy of an EM system appreciably, and then arranging the system so it dissipates that excess energy to power an external load, load-powering can be free except for switching costs. That this is not done in present electrical power systems must therefore be a fault in system design.  And so it is.  The standard closed current loop circuit takes half the extra energy collected in the potentialized (asymmetrically regauged) external circuit, then uses that half of the energy to perform work to destroy the source dipole in the generator that is extracting EM energy from the vacuum and providing the observable Poynting energy flow from the terminals, via the asymmetry of opposite charges.  The other half of the external circuit's collected asymmetrical regauging energy is used to power the losses in the external circuit and the external load. Hence one gets out less work in the load than the work that was performed to destroy the source dipole.  In a 100% efficient generator, it then requires as much additional shaft energy be input to the generator, as the amount of energy that was used to destroy the source dipole and cut off the energy flow from the vacuum.  Hence one is always having to furnish more input energy to the system than the work one gets out in the load.  That totally stupid circuit is universally used, and it guarantees that the free regauging of the system is symmetrical.  In other words, all excess energy collected so freely by gauge freedom, is "locked up" to do only internal work on the system to produce and maintain a change in system stress.  It specifically is prohibited from producing a net translation force that can translate electrons and deliver excess energy to the loads and losses, because it simultaneously deliberately delivers equal excess energy to destroy the continuous extraction of energy from the vacuum by the dipolarity previously established.

We pay the power company to engage in a giant wrestling match inside its own generators and lose!

So the arch skeptics' assumption that COP>1.0  electrical power systems means forbidden "perpetual motion" machines,  which they then equate to machines continuously performing external work with no energy input, is total gibberish and always has been.

Meanwhile, in our analysis summarized above, the source charge and its continuous free extraction of EM energy from the vacuum, and its continual outpouring of real observable EM energy in all directions to form and continuously replenish its associated EM fields and potentials and their energy, has falsified the present statement of the second law of thermodynamics (several forms or statements are currently available). Consequently the second law requires revision.  We have proposed the following as the necessary correction of the second law, which then becomes consistent with experiment and more advanced theory.

"First a negative entropy interaction occurs to produce some controlled order. Then that initial controlled order will either remain the same or be progressively disordered and decontrolled by subsequent entropic interactions, unless additional negative entropy interactions occur and intervene."

Anyway, that is a short summary of the work, and I'm working on a paper now, which hopefully will be finished in several more weeks.

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Best wishes and thanks for the references,

Tom Bearden

Dear sir

You said you are writing article about laws of thermodynamics. Perhaps you have not noticed an article by Alexey Nikulov , that I think very interesting and may be useful to you, about Nano-scale quantum power source made on the base of a system of inhomogeneous mesoscopic superconducting loops, permitted by quantum violations of the second law of thermodynamics, with decrease of entropy. The article is at :

 http://galeb.etf.bg.ac.yu/~vm/cd1/papers/108.pdf

Summary at : http://www.asdn.net/moscow/abstracts/nikulov/

The article was showed at the First International Conference on Quantum Limits to the Second Law-July 29-31, 2002 University of San Diego, San Diego, California, at: http://www.sandiego.edu/secondlaw2002/

Sincerely

Morin