this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
1408 points (96.4% liked)
solarpunk memes
2837 readers
28 users here now
For when you need a laugh!
The definition of a "meme" here is intentionally pretty loose. Images, screenshots, and the like are welcome!
But, keep it lighthearted and/or within our server's ideals.
Posts and comments that are hateful, trolling, inciting, and/or overly negative will be removed at the moderators' discretion.
Please follow all slrpnk.net rules and community guidelines
Have fun!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To be extremely pedantic, operations on physical systems can be performed and perfectly reversed without loss of energy, but you couldn't ever extract anything anywhere along the way - not even direct evidence that it happened. Our models predict that this happens literally all the time in quantum mechanics.
Edit: fun fact: this prediction is actually central to what makes quantum computers work.
That's a good point. I hadn't considered that, as I'm a chemist approaching thermo from the stat mech/free energy POV. I was mostly just thinking that a process where ΔG<0 is spontaneous but if ΔG=0, the system is at equilibrium, so nothing happens.
Now that I type it out, even I know that's not exactly accurate as equilibrium is a dynamic state with lots of things happening at the molecular/electronic scale, so I guess I should have added a qualifier of "at the macroscopic scale" to my original post.