Wave Diodes
Re: Wave Diodes
Now if we could only create an "impulse" diode.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —
— Lord Melbourne —
Re: Wave Diodes
Wha... A one-way mirror? And???
No law violation. If, say, you have a sail in space that is transparent in one direction and opaque in the other, then clearly you will generate a thrust from the light being blocked by the opaque side that. The "equal and opposite reaction" is the impulse of the sail in reaction to the photons striking it.Diogenes wrote:DeltaV wrote:Light has momentum.
Do you suppose THAT would get rectified in a wave diode? What about Newton's Third law?
Somewhat, though as I recall a Maxwell Daemon uses containment on the collection side...The second law of thermodynamics ensures (through statistical probability) that two bodies of different temperature, when brought into contact with each other and isolated from the rest of the Universe, will evolve to a thermodynamic equilibrium in which both bodies have approximately the same temperature. The second law is also expressed as the assertion that in an isolated system, entropy never decreases.kcdodd wrote:My question would concern the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It sounds eerily like a maxwell demon.
Therefore, a flat sheet of this material in space is not a Maxwell's Daemon because "space" is the same container on both sides, its an open system, rather than a closed one.
It would not have to be open. One could divide a container in half with this material where there is vacuum otherwise and only the electromagnetic field as the medium. if more photons could pass one way then the other, then it seems to me the temperature would increase on one side. The maxwell demon was more of a sorting switch which only allowed higher energy particles to pass one way and low energy the other way, but since the EM field doesn't conserve photon number I don't think you would need to go so far as long as there was a net energy transport due to the material.
Carter