Re: Second law in the microscopic scale

[John Denker <jsd@AV8N.COM>]

Quoting Bernard Cleyet <anngeorg@PACBELL.NET>:

> NEW FINDINGS CHALLENGE LAW OF ENTROPY
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2135779.stm

Why inflict that on us now?  Isn't out of season?
That was news in July, 2002.  We've had two Halloweens
and one April Fools since then.

I was going to call those claims a load of rot but then I
decided that would be an unfair insult to the catabolic fungi
of the world.  Rot is much more logical and respectable than
this paper.

Sure, the entropy of the system fluctuates at equilibrium.
But that neither violates nor "defies" the second law as
Evans et al. are claiming.

It is equally true that the energy of the system fluctuates
at equilibrium, and equally nonsensical to claim that this
violates conservation of entropy.

It's easy to find violations of the laws of nature, if you
start by misstating the laws.

Read the sordid details at
  http://rsc.anu.edu.au/~evans/papers/exptFT.pdf

I find it odd that on the PI's web page,
  http://rsc.anu.edu.au/~evans/
although there is a link to the article, you can't find it
by title or author, since it is listed under a very different
title with no mention of the first author or other authors
(Wang et al.).

It is also odd that the article appears to be unknown to
  http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
and to
  http://arxiv.org/multi?group=physics&%2Ffind=Search