The Carnot cycle, named after French engineer Nicolas Leonard Sadi Carnot (1796-1832), is the most efficient cycle possible. It consists of four basic reversible processes meaning that the cycle as a whole is also reversible. The four reversible processes are:
Heat transfer from the working fluid to the low-temperature reservoir (Condenser).
Adiabatic increase in the temperature of the working fluid (Heat Pump).
Heat transfer from the high-temperature reservoir to the working fluid (Boiler).
Adiabatic decrease in the temperature of the working fluid (Turbine).
The Carnot cycle is the most efficient cycle possible.
Links:
Carnot Cycle Demonstration Shows the piston moving and plots the P-V diagram for the cycle.
Heat Engine Calculator Computes changes in thermodynamic variables such as heat transfer, work and entropy change, and plots the process on a P-V diagram. Special Notices - Notes Sp�ciales
This appendix is in English and is accessible to those who speak English; for those who speak French, I will have still to find me the time to translate it.
Cet appendice est en anglais et offre une meilleure possibilt� � ceux qui parlent l'anglais uniquement de comprendre mon oeuvre. � ceux qui parlent le français, de la patience leur est demand�e puisque je suis seul dans ce site de l'Internet.
a. About time travel. Although time travel (which is nowadays only part of the art and of mythology) might be faster than space travel, being not limited by gravity, it has other constraints, as Stephen Hawking has pointed. Indeed, time travel might be only possible for the mind (something that science does not foresee although its many branches use prospective and restropective means) but impossible to realize by the living body. Finally, time travel, although it might allow us to have a closer look at distant things that we presently see but that are not anymore, has no meaning for man if he should, one day, disappear from the universe.(reserve a l'auteur)
b. Are statistics part of mathematics? Mathematics are mainly thought to consist of algebra, geometry, and related branches (including trigonometry). However, statistics are also part of mathematics but use a different method than algebra. While algebra is tedious and uses, often, long algebraic equations leading to many theoretical developments (theories), statistics is simpler but lets more place to improbability to attain the same results (although some zealots claim that probability is not even part of statistics but, in any case, belong to mathematics) . A development of the theory of relativity, the field theory which has a major place in cosmology, is mainly algebraic, while in quantum physics, that Einstein rejected, probability plays an important role. Quantum mechanics has tried to unify those two parts of mathematics.
c. Lemaitre Universe vs. Hawking Universe
In the page on mythology of Les Mobiles Inconscients de la Violence Politique et Sociale en Haiti, I have said that the Big Bang theory which is also a theory of a uniform universe is a scientific algorythm, (cherished by many scientits because it eases calculations and predictions) roots in Judeo-Greco-Roman or Mesopotano-Mediterranean mythology. However, the ancient Greeks, although having contributed to the theory of one Cosmos did not believe in one God, like the Jewishes always do, neither did the Romans who copied the Greek mythology. In fact, Lemaitre was a devoted catholic father who believed sincerely that God laid down the seeds of the Universe. It is also really unfortunate that Stephen Hawking who do not believe in God came to speak of "baby universes", something the development of his theory of time leads it to. There can be only one Universe. Certainly, there can be also a fractal in time but a baby universe that can spring out of the remains of a "lost" universe and establihes itself, with time, as the supreme and unique one (a Darwinian aspect) leads us close to the concept of a cyclical universe.
d. Is Stephen Hawking a theoretical physicist, like Albert Einstein, or a theoretical astronomist?
Man has always tried to understand Nature since it is often for him a question of life and death to understand how he should behave in it and interact with it. The difficulty of many contemporary scientists of Einstein to understand him was that he was essentially a theoretical physicist, trying to explain what any experiment could not measure, or because the experience, when it was possible, would have itself introduced bias into the measurement. The same can be said about Hawking for astronomy. Hawking has always been a puny man and is now totally paralyzed. However, his brain has been working well, and he has been able to explain many aspects of the cosmos, although still too early to be proved, "if ever man makes it."
e. Is Nature chaotic? Nature, as it is known, behaves chaotically. An example is the living nature. Gene transformations would have produced a large ("infinite") variety of living forms, somewhat, may I say it, chaotically, were not the subsequent (sometimes fast) actions of other forces, like natural selection and ultimate death. The order and the hierarchy that we see in the living nature is mainly due to this regulation. Similarly, the Cosmos, say I, behaves chaotically even if some natural forces can put some order in it, and a theory uniformist of its nature will not "seize" it totally.
f. Are there such bizarre things as "cosmological wormholes" and "time warps"? While wormholes and the associated time warps might well exist in a fractal universe and would rule out any uniformist theory of the cosmos, they have never been observed.
g. Can black holes evaporate while heating? Nothing can escape from a black hole. However, black holes are tremendous sources of energy in the universe, as it can be hinted or calculated from the behavior of matter around what it seems unseen stellar structures that are thus black holes candidates. Black holes are not ordinary matter as we may know, but black holes are, anyway, matter. With time, according to special relativity showing that matter can transform itself into energy, a black hole would have transformed all its strange matter into energy and thus would have disappeared from the universe. Since there is no way to see anything from a black hole, it is improperly said that it has simply "evaporated." The universe itself can have such a fate at the end of the Big Crunch, according to the uniformist theories. It will then have to be either created again (Lemaitre approach) or to recycle itself in an unknown manner (the cyclical universe). The new Chaos' theory predicts that the universe can have a different fate and is thus a challenge to the uniformist theory, as I have shown in my second figure.
h. Is the universe flat? We are now entirely in theoretical field. Nothing is set for sure and nothing has been proved, concerning this, but there can be big implications for science. The behavior of the universe in the future depends on the values of its critical energy and of its critical density, leading to three possibilities: (1) the universe is closed, its expansion will halt and it will begin to collapse on itself, setting the path for a rebounding universe, thus violating the thermodynamic principles; (2) the universe is open and will expand for ever, defying all gravitational laws; (3) the third possibilty is even more weird, the universe is closed but it has no limit--it is without boundary. With the third possibilty, gravity will held the sets of the universe together but will flatten the universe while it expands. A new theory of the beginning of the universe, the inflational theory, (which states that at probably the stage of its isothermic expansion (cf. fig. 1) the universe was expanding at a faster rate) would have corrected this weirdness.
i. Is there aything like an imaginary time? Like imaginary numbers, imaginary time is an algorythm to solve scientific problems. Before the imaginary numbers were set, quadratic equations, for example, with a negative number beneath the root square in the quadratic formula could not be solved, robbing thus the mathematician of valuable information. Similarly, with imaginary time it has possible, for Stephen Hawking, to go behind the Big Bang and to rule out any creation of the universe which is mostly an unscientific concept.
j. The famous equation of special relativity (E=mc2) states that matter can be transformed into energy and this has been proved with the building of the atomic bomb, but can energy be transformed into matter? This would have helped to solve the puzzle that pushes Einstein to push ahead its innappropriate cosmological constant. With the superstring theory today, this puzzle can be solved. In a new chapter (VIII), on electromagnetic radiation, this book will show how close is energy to matter and that effectively energy can be transformed into matter prooving that special relativity is indeed true (matter is energy and energy is matter).
k. About space travel. My friend and chessmate, Robert, told me that he did not think that space travel will ever be possible since even if our astronauts travel at the speed of light it will take them one hundred years for them to get to the nearest galaxy. However, I answered him, space travel is not just about traveling from one galaxy to another; it is also about exploring our galaxy and other solar systems in it, and we have the tools to do it yet; we have the space vessels and now the space labs that can be built into space colonies (with many space labs). However, when it will come to leave our galaxy, there will be increasing dificulties due to the great distance but also to the fact that any space colony will be impossible in the interval between those big chunks of matter that are galaxies since those colonies will have to depend on gravity fields to avoid being lost in space.
l. Our major difficulty in uderstanding the universe came from the fact that we want to set it a definite frontiere. With this perspective in mind, I have deliberately named this manuscript The Big Sets - "Les Grands Ensembles". This has avoided me the headaches of speaking, like Stephen Hawking, of Baby Universes, the big sets being able to be any big chunk of matter, like galaxies, black holes, groups of galaxies, supergroups and so on. But what if we understand the Universe as groups instead of sets*?
And what are about the Superestring Theory which unites relativity and quantum mechanics?
m. Our ever changing universe. In the American weekly newspaper Epoch Times International (www.theepochtimes.com) that has often articles that catch my attention, I read, in the edition of Christmas 2005, an article on the formation of new stars in the Milky Way. This article states that the new "...formation, discovered by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, contradicts that stars should be torn apart" in the vicinity of a "black hole" "but may help physicists solve several mysteries about the super-massive black holes taht reside at the centers of nearly all galaxies." The explanation is known as the "disk model theory" which explained how the black hole created those stars by attracting huge mass of gas in which "the gravity of a dense disk of gas around the star" (the black hole) "offsets the tidal forces and allows stars to form." This leads us close to the concept of physicist Albert Einstein of an eternal universe, nevertheless an ever changing one. I invite you also to read my Evolving Universe
n. The crowning of Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking was the first to predict that black holes can generate matter. As the later is torn up in entering the black hole, then crushed and ground in the black hole, it gives up an electron with the rupture of light, the most abundant form of matter, at the event-horizon. So, let us return to the last discovery made at the NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Where do all the clouds of matter that evolve close to the black hole come from? Do they come from inside or from outside? It is a pertinent question for if they come from inside, the cosmological constant of Albert Einstein may well have some truth. Nevertheless, let us put it all together, since themodynamically predicted, the universe can die, evolve to the greatest entropy. Because the time for the black holes to generate new matter in sufficient quantity to replace the lost of matter follwing the dying of the stars and their absorption by black holes is much greater than the one for the disparition of matter into black holes, it is well probable that, any way, the universe as an entity will die. Thus, the last discovery will not contradict the red shift, the background radiation and all those observations which prove that the universe is evolving from the Big Bang, as I have shown it in my graphs, discarding, thus, any further explanation by relativity. However, it will surely prove that a huge and initial black hole - what they presently call a singularity, for it has never been observed and probably never will it - can be at the origin of our universe.
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