Scientists have finally demonstrated that room temperature ambient heat can be converted into usable electric energy. The setup uses a piece of graphene, which ripples due to ambient heat energy existing all around us. This generates a small electric current that is rectified through diodes into one-way current. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201002091029.htm Right now, this is on a very small scale, but it is the first working demonstration that "free energy" may be possible. It does not violate conservation of energy, but some might say it breaks the Second Law of Thermodynamics (or at least the argument arising from it that usable energy cannot be harvested from ambient heat when there is no heat differential).
They state that the temperature of the graphene and circuit stays the same but they seem to have ignored the effect of the graphene 'losing energy' to the circuit on the energy of the environment. The system doesn't seem to be isolated from the environment. This doesn't seem like free energy. Interesting though.
I saw that headline too, on a different article. I only know that it works on a tiny circuit. It might break a law on thermodynamics, but then so did the EM Drive. It could be useful powering small tech devices in places that are isolated from a power source. Like inside the human body, outer space, and so forth. Seriously cool!
The "EM drive" is at this point still not a truly understood phenomena, and many scientists suspect there likely is something they are overlooking that would explain the phenomena away, since the effect is very small. This "free energy" from graphene fits into well established understanding of science much more easily.
If it truly breaks the Second Law then it is a perpetual motion machine of the second kind and may not, by statutory law, be patented by the USPO. The Laws of Thermodynamics are about the only REALLY settled things in modern science. (Though I have read that Quantum Relativity beats them for experimental verification.) OTOH there is some sort of tube commonly used in commercial refrigeration that seemingly breaks the first law, (but doesn't really), so what do I know?
Do you have any links or evidence for that? Let me point out (and I have done this in several past discussions), the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not really a universal law, like all the other laws of the universe. It's more like a statistical law, and is more implicit. I don't think you can truly compare the Second Law of Thermodynamics to something like Conservation of Energy. A lot of you seem to automatically make that error. They're not even in the same ballpark.
ALL scientific statements are statistical observations. That being said I've never yet heard any good arguments to violate the 2nd law but if you know of one and can prove it I won't disagree with a multi-billionaire holder of several Nobels Interesting discussion here: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange...-motion-invention-to-the-scientific-community
Well, to be fair, I did not actually claim that this phenomena necessarily does break the Second Law. In some situations you can transform chaos into order by transforming a part of that chaos into an even more chaotic state. That does not break the Second Law. Of course it's oftentimes not immediately clear how the chaos is transformed into a more chaotic state. I think some of what we might be arguing about is just semantics, missing the meaningful point. The point is that ambient heat energy is being converted into energy which can perform work, without there having to be a difference between temperatures in different areas. Some would consider that breaking the Second, but regardless of whether you want to argue it actually does that or not, it is still an interesting phenomena that has not really been demonstrated before.
