American mathematician turned Lyndon LaRouche economist Jonathan Tennenbaum's hilarious 1993 attempt at refuting the laws of thermodynamics, per some type of anti-cybernetics negentropy argument. |
“There is thus no justification for the view, often glibly repeated, that the second law of thermodynamics is only statistically true, in the sense that microscopic violations repeatedly occur, but never violations of any serious magnitude. On the contrary, no evidence has ever been presented that the second law breaks down under any circumstances.”
“The truth of the second law is therefore a statistical, not a mathematical, truth, for it depends on the fact that the bodies we deal with consist of millions of molecules, and that we never can get a hold of single molecule.”
“It is proved that there are infinitely many ways of choosing the initial conditions such that the system will return infinitely many times as close as one wishes to its initial position … there are also an infinite number of solutions that do not have this property, but it is shown that these unstable solutions can be regarded as ‘exceptional’ and may be said to have zero probability.”
“In fact it would seem reasonable to define life as being characterized by a capacity for evading this law. If probably cannot evade the laws of atomic physics, which are believed to apply as much to the atoms of a brain as to the atoms of a brick, but it seems able to evade this statistical laws of probability.”
“Nor is it to be supposed that the principle of entropy apples to living as it does to non-living systems.”
“The second law of thermodynamics is, without a doubt, one of the most perfect laws in physics. Any reproducible violation of it, however small, would bring the discoverer great riches as well as a trip to Stockholm. The world’s energy problems would be solved at one stroke. It is not possible to find any other law (except, perhaps, for super selection rules such as charge conservation) for which a proposed violation would bring more skepticism than this one. Not even Maxwell’s laws of electricity or Newton’s law of gravitation are so sacrosanct, for each has measurable corrections coming from quantum effects or general relativity.”
“No violation of either physical statement [Clausius or Kelvin statement] of the second law of thermodynamics has ever been observed in a properly done experiment … a machine that would violate the second law and turn heat completely into work in a cyclical process is called a perpetual motion machine of the second kind.”
“The second law of thermodynamics has a different status than that of the other laws of science, such as Newton’s law of gravity, for example, because it does not always hold, just in the vast majority of cases.”Other