The conversion from mass to energy is 100% "efficent", but the use of that energy then won't be. Mass-energy conversion can be efficent in that way, but it refers to energy efficiency, not mass-energy efficiency.tomthebomb137 wrote:The antimatter to matter (or thrust) conversion is 100% effeicient, but thats the only known one. Now us spudders just gota find out how to make antimatter
Of course, once you consider the energy costs of producing said anti-matter in the first place...
@Solar: It's more pseudo-science. Maxwell's daemon was a thought experiment used to daemonstrate (:D) the illogical nature of reduction in entropy. An action cannot (or strictly, is nearly infinitely unlikely to) occur unless the overall entropy sum of both the system and the surroundings is positive.
In the case of it being negative, nothing will happen - but when it's zero, the system is in equilibrium.
Entropy, in short, is the tendency for things to move away from organised states. As I said before, you need a gradient of an intensive quantity to do work.
Imagine a huge warehouse full of sugar, flour or anything - with it all heaped in organised piles.
You can release the gravitational energy from this sugar and flour by moving some of it off the top of heaps into the "valleys". The more height it loses, the more energy you can get from it. However, eventually, you'll end up with an entirely flat floury/sugary "carpet" across the whole floor, where you can't move any thing down (although, add a few chimera eggs, dash of cursed baking powder, cook with hellfire for 20 minutes at 180 degrees C, and you'll have a damned nice cake - Hmm, daemonic cookery).
The universe is like this, with "organised" peaks of energy density. To do work with this energy, you need to move it somewhere with lower energy density. However, doing this reduces the peaks and shallows the valleys - creating a less organised state.
Now, the sugar and flour won't now naturally sweep itself into pure neat piles of separate flour and sugar. Same thing with energy, it won't naturally concentrate. To pump extra air into a high pressure tank is to concentrate energy, so the process as they describe it would result in a reduction of entropy on a considerable scale.
So, this is not a practical use of the Bernoulli principle - but it can be used for some very interesting applications though.
By increase a gas' velocity enough (by converting it's initial pressure to velocity), then you can reduce it's pressure below atmospheric pressure to produce vacuums.
For example, it has been used in injectors, Aspirators (very similar to injectors), Blowgun booster nozzles, and material transfer units.
Now, how does Maxwell's daemon fit into that weird explanation? Imagine a little daemon caretaker who comes in at night, then sorts your sugar and flour back into neat piles of each. Not a perfect example, but the concept of Maxwell's daemon is that having this organisation naturally take place would require some form of weird intervention. This doesn't happen, so anything that claims to use it is talking male bovine excreta.
On second thoughts... you'd have done better reading wikipedia. Entropy is a weird thing, and not particularly easy to explain.
Again, in short - free energy ain't gonna happen.