Meeting the Entropy Challenge: An International Thermodynamics Symposium in Honor and Memory of Professor Joseph Henry Keenan

An International Thermodynamics Symposium
In Honor and Memory of Professor Joseph Henry Keenan

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• Overview
• Program
• About J.H. Keenan

Contact

• Schedule
• Panel Questions

Panel Discussion Questions

The following questions have been addressed during the panel discussions. A small number of registered attendees have been selected to make 6 minute presentations based on the questions below during the panel discussions.

Foundations of the Second Law

• Why is the second law true? Is it an inviolable law of nature? If not, is it possible to develop a perpetual motion machine of the second kind?
• Are second law limitations objective or subjective, real or apparent, due to the nature of physical states or the representation and manipulation of information? Is entropy a physical property in the same sense as energy is universally understood to be an intrinsic property of matter?
• Does the second law conflict with quantum mechanics? Are the differences between mechanical and thermodynamic descriptions of physical phenomena reconcilable? Does the reversible law of motion of hamiltonian mechanics and quantum mechanics conflict with the empirical observation of irreversible phenomena?

Frontiers of the Second Law

• Is the second law relevant when we trap single ions, prepare, manipulate and measure single photons, excite single atoms, induce spin echoes, measure quantum entanglement? Is it possible or impossible to build Maxwell demons that beat the second law by exploiting fluctuations?
• Is the maximum entropy generation principle capable of unifying nonequilibrium molecular dynamics, chemical kinetics, nonlocal and nonequilibrium rheology, biological systems, natural structures, and cosmological evolution?
• Research in quantum computation and quantum information has raised many fundamental questions about the foundations of quantum theory. Are any of these questions related to the second law?

Teaching the Second Law

• Why is the second law taught in so many different ways? Why so many textbooks on thermodynamics? Why so many schools of thought?
• Some say that thermodynamics is limited to equilibrium, others that it extends to nonequilibrium?
• How is entropy defined for nonequilibrium states?

Energy and the Second Law

• Current state-of-the-art efficiency of combined-cycle energy conversion technology is about 60%. Based on the trend of historical data, some forecast that second-law efficiency of energy conversion will reach 80% by the end of the century. What technologies are at sight that might hold this promise?
• Nanotechnologies and microtechnologies point towards the development of microscopic heat engines? How do second law limitations map down to these scales?
• Combustion is the principal way of converting the chemical energy of fossil fuels to thermal energy, but it is highly irreversible. Are there promising ways to reduce combustion irreversibility? Are fuel cells the only alternative to combustion?

Joseph Henry Keenan (1900–1977) is regarded as a noted authority in thermodynamics, whose interests have extended from jet and rocket propulsion, to the properties of steam, to gas turbines, to the development of the conceptual foundations of thermodynamics.