Abstract
The concatenation of one cycle in the operation of a reversible heat engine with that process in which the engine’s work output is irreversibly degraded into heat at the temperature of the cold reservoir, transforms the effects of the former into a couple of irreversible heat transfers. One of these heat transfers is found to be credited, via thermodynamic-sanctioned procedures, with two different entropy changes. A logical analysis centered on the principle of contradiction rejects one of these entropy changes as well as the thermodynamic notion leading to it. The rejected notion, the one assigning a zero entropy change to the heat-to-work transformation, brings to light a counterexample to the second law of thermodynamics in the form of an isothermal and reversible process with a different from zero total entropy change.
Highlights
No one has expressed the true reach of the law of increasing entropy in simpler terms than Roger Caillois: “Clausius and Darwin cannot both be right” (Prigogine, 1980)
While Farmer states: “I’d like to believe is described by some counterpart of the second law of thermodynamics—some law that would describe the tendency of matter to organize itself, and that would predict the general properties of organization we’d expect to see in the universe” (Waldrop, 1992); Kauffman, on his part, inquires “Could there possibly be a fourth law of thermodynamics for open thermodynamic systems, some law that governs biospheres anywhere in the cosmos or the cosmos itself” (Kauffman, 2004)?
As will here be shown, no fourth law is needed to bring self-organizing phenomena into the realm of thermodynamics, but a simple elimination of a theoretical flaw hidden among the notions sustaining the edifice of what is known as the law of increasing entropy
Summary
No one has expressed the true reach of the law of increasing entropy in simpler terms than Roger Caillois: “Clausius and Darwin cannot both be right” (Prigogine, 1980). As the following quotes attest, the need is felt for a new theoretical construction capable of doing what Prigogine’s Dissipative Structures paradigm was supposed to have accomplished: solving the paradox represented by the second law’s future of decay, and nature’s incessant success in turning chaos into order. As will here be shown, no fourth law is needed to bring self-organizing phenomena into the realm of thermodynamics, but a simple elimination of a theoretical flaw hidden among the notions sustaining the edifice of what is known as the law of increasing entropy. The construction arising from this correction manages to bring together, in a simple equation, the opposites at play in natural processes: the entropy increasing effects associated to the irreversible degradation of work into heat and the entropy decreasing effects of work creation via the upgrading of heat into work
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