Order From Chaos: A Reconsideration of Fundamental Principles

Traditional discussions of the Second Law of Thermodynamics studied the limits of very specific types of devices, such as heat engines, chemical reactions, and molecules channeled by valves. Allahverdyan and Nieuwenhuizen (cond-mat/0110422) have come the closest to proving a more general form of the Second Law, applicable to field effect devices -- but recently (cond-mat/0408537) they have observed counterexamples and loopholes. This paper discusses recent field effect nanotechnologies which might permit a more substantial counterexample. Efforts were made to disprove the possibility of extracting electricity from ambient heat, from another perspective -- but these efforts led only to a new result on the equivalence of classical and quantum statistics, which may be important to the backwards-time interpretation of quantum mechanics.