The second law of thermodynamics is riddled with (in percentage terms extremely rare) exceptions

TL;DR

This paper presents a macroscopic counterexample to the second law of thermodynamics, demonstrating spontaneous entropy reduction and energy harvesting from a single reservoir due to size effects and particle extent.

Contribution

It introduces a novel macroscopic mechanism that repeatedly produces entropy sinks, challenging the traditional understanding of the second law.

Findings

Experiment confirms spontaneous entropy reduction.

Energy can be harvested from a single reservoir.

Size effects enable second law exceptions.

Abstract

Statistical mechanics descriptions of the second law of thermodynamics generally imply point-like particles driven by a dissipative overall mechanism for their simultaneous time-evolution. As the number of involved particles grows larger, it becomes more and more unlikely that they by itself adopt an off-equilibrium state with lower entropy. We present a macroscopic counterexample of the second law that repeatedly and spontaneously produces an entropy sink, thus recurrently enables us to harvest energy that sidesteps all the compensation interactions with the surroundings. Hence, this mechanism extracts energy from a single reservoir. This proves true in an experiment and is explained as a consequence of size effects, among them nonzero particle extent that marginally amend crucial peculiarities of thermodynamic equilibrium dynamics.