|
|
 Originally Posted by OngBonga
Despite my tone, this has tweaked my curiosity a little.
I mean, taking energy and mashing it all together to make, well either an ion or even a stable atom, that's kind of like collecting all the ash up and making a log out of it. Is this actually possible, in theory? I was always told it wasn't possible, but I was never really convinced. I mean it's impossible because we're going to lose ash, which means we never reproduce exactly what was burned, but let's assume we can collect 100% of the ash and heat... I'm not asking if we can do it, because obviously we can't, but could a super-intelligent alien?
In theory, the log can be unburned at a cost of even more entropy than it originally produced in burning, plus all the released energy in the form of heat and light and noise, etc. and you have to have all the original matter to reassemble into the pre-combusted molecules.
Maybe a talented chemist could coax that chemical process to run in reverse on the microscopic level, but IDK.
I suspect that un-rusting iron would be easier to do. Rust and fire are chemically similar in that they're both exothermic oxidation processes.
Quantum Mechanically, all processes are reversible, so entropy doesn't exist at the particle level. Entropy is an emergent property of many-particle systems. "Many" is still poorly defined and understood. Active research in this field is called mesoscale (in-between-sized) physics.
In theory, everything we see happening "forward in time" can be seen "backward in time," but dissipating energy in the form of heat, light, sound, etc. has an incredibly low probability of happening in reverse. A thing exploding from a central source is easy to create. Unexploding a thing by trying to get all the particles moving exactly just so to come together in a dynamite stick is, like, super hard [citation needed].
***
Upon further reflection, all those unstable isotopes will decay into stable atoms or ions, so the assertion that it creates stable atoms isn't really that terrible.
|
Reply With Quote