a physicist finally gets a clue

[scruffy]

The first law of thermodynamics can not be applied to systems for which "temperature" can not be defined.

Gee, who'd-a-thunk.

Physicists give the first law of thermodynamics a makeover

Physicists at West Virginia University have made a breakthrough on an age-old limitation of the first law of thermodynamics.

www.sciencedaily.com

""We generalized the first law of thermodynamics for systems that are not in equilibrium," Cassak said. "We did a pencil and paper calculation to find how much energy is associated with matter not being in equilibrium, and it works whether the system is close to or far from equilibrium".

What does that remind you of? Anyone?

Who said entanglement, was that you?

"Information lost in entanglement" is a measure of lack of independence, which is the same as saying the various states in a microcanonical ensemble aren't equally probable.

Energy gets stored in the information, and vice versa.

 

[sparky]

What does that remind you of? Anyone?

~S~

 

[scruffy]

~S~

This is a part of my continuing series on what constitutes "the system".

In another thread I posted about putting energy in to the vacuum in one place, and drawing it out in another.

The Chinese have verified continuous quantum entanglement over a distance of more than 10,000 miles.

SOMETHING is going on. Einstein's field equation is incomplete. I think I know which part it is, it's the lambda that modifies the curvature tensor, the part they call the "cosmological constant".

I claim it's not a constant. I think Einstein recognized this too, before he died he said introducing that term was the biggest scientific blunder of his life. He never fixed it, though.

 

[para bellum]

Back when I was in school, the Laws of Thermodynamics always began with 4 simple words. "In a closed system". They are probably the most misquoted and misapplied laws of physics by non-scientists.
There are no naturally occurring equilibrium states in the universe. Any system in equilibrium is man-made. Even things we think of as in equilibrium- like the moon's orbit around the earth- are not really in equilibrium. The moon get a little bit farther away every year, eventually it will escape and fly away into space.

The main reason economists are so bad at predicting the future is that the differential equations used by economists were hijacked from thermodynamics in the early 1900's. Problem is, economies are not closed systems. You can never reach the equilibrium states that economists envision, the perfect balance of supply and demand, etc.

All of physics is a kind of simplification of the universe to "dumb it down" to a human comprehension level. Physics is great and fascinating and useful, but it's only half the picture. The other half is chaos theory, and that's what defines the boundary conditions that physics relies on.