🚀 go-pugleaf

> http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
> Jos Uffink: "This summary leads to the question whether it is fruitful
> to see irreversibility or time-asymmetry as the essence of the second
> law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the unargued
> statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained
> attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that Ehrenfest-
> Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion about the
> arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the thermodynamics is
> actually a RED HERRING."
>
> The deductive chain leading to the red herring was so biased and
> invalid that the final conclusion ("Entropy always increases") was
> just as meaningful as "The greenness of the crocodile exceeds its
> length". So the dawn of Postscientism broke: a student who accepts the
> red herring is committed to accepting anything, e.g.:
>
> L. McGlashan, Chemical thermodynamics, Academic Press, London (1979),
> pp. 72-73: "For an infinitesimal change in the state of a phase alpha
> we write
> dU = T dS - p dV + SUM mu_B dn_B (1)
> We regard equation (1) as an axiom and call it the fundamental
> equation for a change of the state of a phase alpha. It is one half of
> the second law of thermodynamics. We do not ask where it comes from.
> Indeed we do not admit the existence of any more fundamental relations
> from which it might have been derived. Nor shall we here enquire into
> the history of its formulation, though that is a subject of great
> interest to the historian of science. It is a starting point ; it must
> be learnt by heart."
>
> http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/barn_pole.html
> "These are the props. You own a barn, 40m long, with automatic doors
> at either end, that can be opened and closed simultaneously by a
> switch. You also have a pole, 80m long, which of course won't fit in
> the barn. Now someone takes the pole and tries to run (at nearly the
> speed of light) through the barn with the pole horizontal. Special
> Relativity (SR) says that a moving object is contracted in the
> direction of motion: this is called the Lorentz Contraction. So, if
> the pole is set in motion lengthwise, then it will contract in the
> reference frame of a stationary observer.....So, as the pole passes
> through the barn, there is an instant when it is completely within the
> barn. At that instant, you close both doors simultaneously, with your
> switch. Of course, you open them again pretty quickly, but at least
> momentarily you had the contracted pole shut up in your barn. The
> runner emerges from the far door unscathed.....If the doors are kept
> shut the rod will obviously smash into the barn door at one end. If
> the door withstands this the leading end of the rod will come to rest
> in the frame of reference of the stationary observer. There can be no
> such thing as a rigid rod in relativity so the trailing end will not
> stop immediately and the rod will be compressed beyond the amount it
> was Lorentz contracted. If it does not explode under the strain and it
> is sufficiently elastic it will come to rest and start to spring back
> to its natural shape but since it is too big for the barn the other
> end is now going to crash into the back door and the rod will be
> trapped in a compressed state inside the barn."
>
> Sir Arthur Eddington, Einstein's original worshipper, had no doubts
> about the paramount importance of the red herring:
>
> http://web.mit.edu/keenansymposium/overview/background/index.html
> Arthur Eddington: "The law that entropy always increases, holds, I
> think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone
> points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in
> disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for
> Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation
> - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your
> theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics, I can
> give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest
> humiliation."

Part of the idiocy involved in the red herring, "the law that entropy
always increases":

Peter Atkins, Physical Chemistry, 5th ed., p. 127: "Let the original
change in the entropy of the system when the process of interest
occurs be dS (this is the change we want to measure). The process need
not be reversible, but we suppose that we can find a path that joins
the same initial and final states and which is reversible."

For 140 years the above idiocy has been questioned only once:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
p.39: "A more important objection, it seems to me, is that Clausius
bases his conclusion that the entropy increases in a nicht umkehrbar
[irreversible] process on the assumption that such a process can be
closed by an umkehrbar [reversible] process to become a cycle. This is
essential for the definition of the entropy difference between the
initial and final states. But the assumption is far from obvious for a
system more complex than an ideal gas, or for states far from
equilibrium, or for processes other than the simple exchange of heat
and work."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com