"For 150 years the second law of thermodynamics has been considered inviolable by the general scientific community; however over the last three decades its absolute status has been challenged by dozens of theoretical and experimental counterexamples...
Commercially successful second law devices could disrupt the current energy economy and help support a sustainable energy future." https://philpapers.org/rec/SHEBTT-2

"If environmental heat can be economically converted into useful work on a wide scale—electrical, mechanical, chemical—the effects on the energy sector, the global economy, societal and ecological welfare, warfare, and virtually all aspects of
civilization and its relationship to Nature are difficult to predict, but they are likely to be profound—and, we hope, mostly salutary. Of course, every technology is two-edged, depending on its application. In light of second law developments since
the mid-1990s, now might seem a good time to start preparing for a world in which thermal energy will be the coin of the realm. Actually, probably not. Technological revolutions typically take decades to unfold. The carbon fuel revolution
involving coal, oil, and gas took a couple of centuries to blossom fully, and the semiconductor revolution (still in progress) has taken more than 70 years to mature. Given the imperative of weaning off carbon fuels, perhaps the second law revolution
will be quicker, but history, as well as the vast economic and political forces aligned against such changes, does not favor this scenario." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364656198_Sustainable_Energy_and_the_Second_Law_of_Thermodynamics_An_
Introduction_to_the_Special_Issue

Dozens of theoretical and experimental counterexamples? Environmental heat converted into useful work? Preparing for a world in which thermal energy will be the coin of the realm? No, says Philip Ball to enthusiasts, prepare for the deepest humiliation:

Philip Ball: "In all of physical law, there’s arguably no principle more sacrosanct than the second law of thermodynamics — the notion that entropy, a measure of disorder, will always stay the same or increase. “If someone points out to you that
your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations,” wrote the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington in his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World. “If it is found
to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest
humiliation.” No violation of this law has ever been observed, nor is any expected." https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-trace-the-rise-in-entropy-to-quantum-information-20220526/

Pentcho Valev https://twitter.com/pentcho_valev

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Philip Ball: "Michelson and Morley set out to detect the ether by recording the velocity of beams of light travelling in different directions. They expected to see different speeds for each beam, caused by the motion of Earth through the ether. To their
surprise, they saw nothing of the sort — the speed of light remained constant in all directions." https://www.nature.com/articles/427482a

Exactly the opposite is true. Michelson and Morley expected to see constant, determined only by the ether and independent of the motion of the Earth, speed for either beam. The null result unequivocally showed that the speed of light was c'=c±v in the
direction of the motion of the Earth and c'=c in the perpendicular direction:

"Emission theory, also called emitter theory or ballistic theory of light, was a competing theory for the special theory of relativity, explaining the results of the Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887...The name most often associated with emission
theory is Isaac Newton. In his corpuscular theory Newton visualized light "corpuscles" being thrown off from hot bodies at a nominal speed of c with respect to the emitting object, and obeying the usual laws of Newtonian mechanics, and we then expect
light to be moving towards us with a speed that is offset by the speed of the distant emitter (c ± v)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_theory

Banesh Hoffmann, Einstein's co-author, admits that, originally ("without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations"), the Michelson-Morley experiment was compatible with Newton's variable speed of light, c'=c±v, and
incompatible with the constant speed of light, c'=c:

"Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train
at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus
automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms
of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether." Banesh Hoffmann, Relativity and Its Roots, p.92 https://www.amazon.
com/Relativity-Its-Roots-Banesh-Hoffmann/dp/0486406768

Philip Ball, as an editor of the most prestigious scientific journal and an over-hyped science writer, has done a big job in paralyzing heresy in modern physics and marginalising people opposing the ruling ideology. So he and his friends (and a few other
chosen ones) are now the only critics, iconoclasts, revolutionaries etc:

Philip Ball: "Did Einstein discover E=mc2?...The biggest revelation for me was not so much seeing that there were several well-founded precursors for the equivalence of mass and energy, but finding that this equivalence seems to have virtually nothing to
do with special relativity. Tony Rothman said to me that "I've long maintained that the conventional history of science, as presented in the media, textbooks and by the stories scientists tell themselves is basically a collection of fairy tales." I'd
concur with that." http://philipball.blogspot.com/2011/08/did-einstein-discover-emc2.html

Philip Ball: "And by making the clock's tick relative - what happens simultaneously for one observer might seem sequential to another - Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a
dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says [Lee] Smolin." http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/10/time-reborn-farewell-reality-
review

Pentcho Valev https://twitter.com/pentcho_valev

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