patentNumber: "US-IMP-4,663,812" title: "Domestic Entropy Reversal Engine" titleRu: "Бытовой двигатель обращения энтропии" filingDate: "March 22, 1958" filingDateRu: "22 марта 1958 г." issueDate: "November 14, 1963" issueDateRu: "14 ноября 1963 г." inventor: "Mrs. Beatrice A. Forthwright" inventorRu: "г-жа Беатрис А. Фортрайт" inventorSlug: "beatrice-forthwright" classification: "Thermodynamic Heresies" status: "Provisionally Impossible" abstract: "A domestic appliance for the selective reversal of thermodynamic entropy within a bounded household volume, enabling the restoration of any object, surface, or prepared foodstuff to any prior state of lower entropy without commensurate expenditure of work, the extracted disorder being conveyed by a proprietary Cosmic Disordering Port (4) to an unspecified region of the cosmos not less than twelve parsecs from the domestic premises. The apparatus comprises an outer housing (1) of pressed steel in cream enamel, an entropy detection array (2) of seventeen convergent temporal sensors with a lookback window of forty years, an entropy reversal manifold (3) circulating a working fluid of negative entropic potential, a cosmic disordering port (4), a selectivity dial (5) calibrated in years before present, and a containment field projector (6) to confine the effect to the selected target without disturbing adjacent objects." abstractRu: "Бытовой прибор для избирательного обращения термодинамической энтропии в ограниченном объёме жилища, позволяющий восстанавливать любой предмет, поверхность или приготовленный продукт до любого предшествующего состояния с меньшей энтропией без соразмерных затрат работы; извлечённый беспорядок отводится через запатентованный Космический коллектор рассеивания (4) в неустановленный район Вселенной на расстоянии не менее двенадцати парсек от жилых помещений. Аппарат включает внешний корпус (1) из штампованной стали с кремовой эмалью, массив обнаружения энтропии (2) из семнадцати сходящихся временны́х датчиков с окном ретроспективного просмотра в сорок лет, коллектор обращения энтропии (3), циркулирующий рабочую жидкость отрицательного энтропийного потенциала, космический коллектор рассеивания (4), диск выбора (5), откалиброванный в годах до настоящего момента, и проектор поля удержания (6)." citations:

• "US-IMP-2,991,103"
• "US-IMP-2,847,221"

Field of InventionОбласть изобретенияField of Invention

The present invention relates to domestic appliances for household maintenance, and more particularly to an appliance capable of restoring any object within a household to a prior state of order without the commensurate input of work ordinarily demanded by the second law of thermodynamics.

BackgroundПредпосылкиBackground

The maintenance of a household in a state of orderliness is one of the most persistent and least rewarded challenges confronting the domestic operator. The natural tendency of any closed system toward states of increasing entropy — documented exhaustively by Clausius (1865) and subsequently confirmed by every domestic operator in recorded history — manifests in the household as: the soiling of laundry, the accumulation of correspondence on kitchen surfaces, the cooling of prepared meals, the gradual assumption by living rooms of the character of second-hand furniture depots, and the systematic migration of objects from locations known to locations unknown.

The domestic operator is accordingly required to invest continuous labor to counteract this tendency, labor which produces no net output and admits of neither accumulation nor investment. Prior domestic appliances — washing machines, vacuum cleaners, mechanical refrigerators — address the entropy problem only in piecemeal fashion, and only by displacing entropy to the power-generating infrastructure rather than eliminating it. No prior art device reverses thermodynamic entropy in any meaningful sense.

The present invention provides a domestic appliance that reverses entropy selectively within a bounded household volume without commensurate entropy increase anywhere within the local energy budget of the premises.

Summary of the InventionКраткое изложение изобретенияSummary of the Invention

The apparatus comprises:

• An outer housing (1) of pressed steel construction, dimensioned for installation beneath a standard domestic kitchen counter, finished in a cream enamel described by the assignee as Provisional Ivory and by the Bureau's examiner as off-white;
• An entropy detection array (2), comprising seventeen convergent temporal sensors arrayed in a hemispherical cowling, calibrated to detect the deviation of any object within the domestic volume from any prior lower-entropy state within a lookback window of not less than forty years;
• An entropy reversal manifold (3), comprising coiled pipe of a composition proprietary to the assignee, through which a working fluid of negative entropic potential is circulated at a volumetric flow rate sufficient to reverse the selected target within a processing time of not more than four minutes;
• A cosmic disordering port (4), an aperture of seven centimeters diameter in the rear panel of the housing, through which extracted entropy is vented continuously to an unspecified remote region of the cosmos not less than twelve parsecs from the domestic premises;
• A selectivity dial (5), calibrated in years before present, graduated from yesterday (1) to the year of manufacture (40), by which the operator specifies the target prior state; and
• A containment field projector (6), coupled to the entropy detection array, which confines the reversal effect to the selected target object or surface without disturbing adjacent objects, persons, or ongoing culinary operations.

Detailed DescriptionПодробное описаниеDetailed Description

In operation, the domestic operator surveys the household volume and, by means of the containment field projector (6), designates the object or surface to be restored — for example: a set of dinner plates soiled in the course of an evening meal; a bedroom carpet bearing the compacted impression of twelve years' habitual furniture arrangement; or a jar of apricot preserves whose stated sell-by date has been exceeded by a margin that strains domestic optimism.

The operator sets the selectivity dial (5) to the appropriate prior date. The entropy detection array (2) interrogates the selected object's present state and computes, from the temporal sensor readings, the configuration of that object at the elected prior date. The entropy reversal manifold (3) then circulates the working fluid of negative entropic potential, reversing the object's local thermodynamic trajectory. The dinner plates are restored to a state of pre-meal cleanliness. The carpet reassumes its original pile depth and factory colour. The preserves revert to a condition preceding the onset of fermentation, emerging in a state indistinguishable from new-bought, retaining only the label, which the Bureau considers a defect of the present embodiment and recommends the assignee address in a continuation application.

The extracted disorder is simultaneously expelled through the cosmic disordering port (4) at the rear of the housing. Testing by the assignee has demonstrated that the port's output, dispersed over interstellar distances, produces no measurable increase in the entropy of any observable cosmic structure. The assignee's counsel acknowledges, in a footnote to the specification, that no observable is not the same as no actual.

ClaimsФормула изобретенияClaims

1. A domestic appliance for the selective reversal of thermodynamic entropy within a bounded household volume, comprising: an entropy detection array; an entropy reversal manifold; a cosmic disordering port; and a selectivity dial by which a target prior state is specified.

2. The appliance of claim 1, wherein said entropy detection array comprises temporal sensors having a lookback window of not less than forty years.

3. The appliance of claim 1, wherein said entropy reversal manifold circulates a working fluid of negative entropic potential at a rate sufficient to effect reversal within four minutes.

4. The appliance of claim 1, wherein said cosmic disordering port is configured to vent extracted entropy to a region of the cosmos not less than twelve parsecs from the domestic premises.

5. The appliance of claim 1, further comprising a containment field projector configured to confine the reversal effect to a selected target object without disturbing adjacent objects, persons, or ongoing culinary operations.

6. A method of domestic maintenance comprising: selecting an object; specifying a target prior state by means of a selectivity dial; and activating an entropy reversal manifold to restore said object to said prior state, while venting the extracted disorder cosmically.

Why This Violates Physics (For Now)Почему это нарушает физику (пока)Why This Violates Physics (For Now)

The Bureau holds the present invention to be provisionally impossible under the second law of thermodynamics as that law is presently understood and confirmed by experiment.

First, the second law — in the formulations of Clausius, Kelvin, and Boltzmann — holds that the total entropy of a closed system cannot decrease spontaneously. The household together with any apparatus operating within it constitutes such a system. The apparatus does not dispute this: it proposes to export entropy through the cosmic disordering port. The Bureau's objection is not to the export but to the accounting. The working fluid of negative entropic potential is itself a thermodynamic system; its circulation requires the performance of work. No specification is provided for the source of this work, nor for the regeneration of the fluid's negative entropic potential after it has been expended. The assignee's counsel, when pressed, referred the Bureau to Appendix C, which contains a diagram labeled Energy Recovery Schematic that the Bureau's examiner described in a marginal annotation as wishful.

Second, the apparatus requires the measurement of an object's prior state through temporal sensor interrogation — that is, it requires knowledge of a past configuration that no local instrument can access. Maxwell's demon, which also proposed a second-law violation by selective molecular sorting, was shown by Szilard (1929) and Landauer (1961) to be thermodynamically non-violating because the information acquisition required for its operation is itself entropically costly, erasing which costs at least kT ln 2 per bit. The entropy detection array, in acquiring forty years of an object's prior state, must process and erase a quantity of information vastly exceeding the entropy it proposes to reverse.

Third, the cosmic disordering port raises the question of mechanism: by what physical process is entropy conveyed instantaneously to a region twelve parsecs distant? No carrier field or propagation medium is specified. Propagation at the speed of light would introduce a delay of thirty-nine years, rendering the device unsuitable for the reversal of dinner plates, which are required within the same evening. The assignee's counsel has proposed, in correspondence subsequent to the original filing, a non-local entropic coupling analogous to quantum entanglement. The Bureau notes that quantum entanglement does not permit the transmission of information, let alone entropy, and declines to accept the analogy.

The Bureau accordingly places the present application on the register as provisionally impossible, to await such future revision of thermodynamic law, information theory, and cosmic accounting practices as may render it reducible to practice. The Bureau further notes that the assignee has requested expedited examination on the grounds that her kitchen requires it. The Bureau considers this an insufficient ground for expedition and has replied accordingly. Citations: Clausius, R., Ann. Phys. 125, 353 (1865); Szilard, L., Z. Phys. 53, 840 (1929); Landauer, R., IBM J. Res. Dev. 5, 183 (1961); Maxwell, J.C., Theory of Heat, 4th ed., Longmans, London (1875).