Implementing Demons and Ratchets

Implementing Demons and Ratchets

Experimental results show that ratchets may be implemented in semiconductor and chemical systems, bypassing the second law and opening up huge gains in energy production. This paper summarizes or describes experiments and results on systems that effect demons and ratchets operating in chemical or electrical domains. One creates temperature differences that can be harvested by a heat engine. A s...

On Demons and Oracles

Fabulous beasts and demons

Mythical beasts and fabulous animals have always proved to be a popular theme and many books describing them have already appeared. This one, however, is probably the largest, and certainly the most sumptuously illustrated. It also deals more adequately with the rich oriental aspects of the theme than most of its predecessors. Written by a professor of oriental archaeology in the University of ...

Botanical ratchets.

Ratcheting surfaces are a common motif in nature and appear in plant awns and grasses. They are known to proffer selective advantages for seed dispersion and burial. In two simple model experiments, we show that these anisotropically toothed surfaces naturally serve as motion rectifiers and generically move in a unidirectional manner, when subjected to temporally and spatially symmetric excitat...

Demons anD the Quest entropy