Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/244

240 $$B$$ can be carefully let down, and the havoc wrought by the sweep of $$A$$ can be undone. The result of this operation, however, would be to leave the system $$B$$ in the condition in which it would be degenerated if the process $$B$$ had been allowed to sweep instead of being let down. This is very much as if, having two similar houses $$A$$ and $$B$$, one of which $$A$$ has been burned, we could rig up a mechanism which would let down $$B$$ to ashes and cause $$A$$ to be restored in the original actual materials of which it was first constructed. This is of course impossible in the case of the two houses, but it is possible in every known case of thermodynamic degeneration. This general theorem is as thoroughly established as any generalization in physics, and if it is true and if we ever find a way to convert heat into work unconditionally and without cost or compensation, then it will be proved indirectly that a shaft can be driven by heating one of the bearings in which it rotates, for direct conversion of work into heat by one process must be according to this general theorem equivalent to and replaceable by the reverse of any ordinary sweeping process which converts work into heat.

(d) A gas cannot pass directly from a region of low pressure into a region of high pressure, nor can a gas be transferred from a region of low pressure to a region of high pressure by any means without compensation.

Imagine a gas squirting itself backwards through a nozzle into a high-pressure reservoir! The repeated statement of self-evident facts concerning direct repair in these statements of the second law of thermodynamics may seem ridiculous to the intelligent reader, but the second law of thermodynamics is a statement of a fact which every one knows coupled with a generalizing clause which, once thoroughly understood, is almost if not quite self-evident.

Here is one more statement of the second law of thermodynamics, the oldest English version of it:

 Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, All the king's horses and all the king's men Can not put Humpty Dumpty together again.

This is perhaps the most sensible of all the statements of the second law, for which we will allow it to pass for the moment, inasmuch as it ignores direct repair and refers at once to the most powerful of external means. It is important, however, to remember that in Humpty Dumpty's case we are concerned with structural degeneration, not with the much simpler kind of degeneration in a structureless fluid due to turbulence.

Of all the generalizations of physics, the second law of thermodynamics is certainly the most deeply seated in the common sense of