Letter: Power plays

Editor, Daily News:

Edward Weilhoefer's May 29 response to James Burrows' electric car proposal (which I'm sorry I missed) reminded me of my proposing the same idea — that of a self-sustaining energy source consisting of an electric motor, powered by a generator which it drives — to my patent-attorney father when I was 10 years old!

He pointed out the problem with this notion just as Weilhoefer does, for it violates some basic physics.

The first law of thermodynamics states that the total amount of energy in the universe is constant and can neither be created or destroyed, although, according to the second law, it can be made unavailable.

Burrows proposes to violate this law by having a system that not only keeps running all by itself, but apparently also provides power for an electric car. In short, he proposes to create a steady stream of energy out of nothing.

Weilhoefer correctly points out that even after you started such a motor-generator setup, the energy you put in would be quickly dissipated as heat. That's the making of energy unavailable that the second law talks about. Heat is the so-called disordered form of energy, and the chance of its ever going back to an ordered form (such as electrical energy or mechanical motion) is microscopic.

Energy gets made unavailable every day through friction, electrical resistance and the mixing of hot and cold substances without using the temperature difference; and one can conceive of a time when all energy has been made unavailable so that nothing is moving and everything is at the same temperature. This situation is called "the heat of the universe," but we needn't worry about it, as it is not imminent.

But then, neither is the "self-sustaining energy" mentioned by Victor Nittolo in a subsequent letter.

Dean S. Edmonds Jr. , Naples