While true, that can’t be all that’s wrong with it, because otherwise if you did this even once, turning all your mass to waste heat, you’d still have violated the First Law. It would still be more useless energy than you started with. Right?
Even the highest entropy energy can still be used to do work, it’s just not as efficient. I would predict that a team of engineers/physicists could exploit this to get free energy in the counter-factual universe where this is the only difference between our laws of physics.
I would expect most of the loss to take place in the collection stage, but short of antimatter, a perfect energy-mass conversion technique doesn’t seem to be available, so there are probably plenty of waste particles when it’s converted to energy as well.
(The parent was at −4 when I found it. When I expanded the comment to read it, I was extremely confused, because it did not fall into my “LW users will downvote this heavily” pattern. ??? )
I didn’t downvote it because it was a plausible-sounding suggestion which led to a clarifying discussion, but my guess is that some downvoted it for giving a somewhat irrelevant/misleading answer. As Adele_L explains, heat loss pertains to the Second Law, while the proposed setup has the more fundamental problem of violating the First Law and even assuming away heat loss does not work because of gravitational redshift, as Plasmon explains.
My guess is that you’d lose some of the energy as heat every time you tried to convert it into mass.
While true, that can’t be all that’s wrong with it, because otherwise if you did this even once, turning all your mass to waste heat, you’d still have violated the First Law. It would still be more useless energy than you started with. Right?
Energy tends to become more useless, so I don’t see how that’s an argument against my point.
This is true, and is an informal version of the second law of thermodynamics.
But this violates a different law, conservation of energy.
Even the highest entropy energy can still be used to do work, it’s just not as efficient. I would predict that a team of engineers/physicists could exploit this to get free energy in the counter-factual universe where this is the only difference between our laws of physics.
I would expect most of the loss to take place in the collection stage, but short of antimatter, a perfect energy-mass conversion technique doesn’t seem to be available, so there are probably plenty of waste particles when it’s converted to energy as well.
(The parent was at −4 when I found it. When I expanded the comment to read it, I was extremely confused, because it did not fall into my “LW users will downvote this heavily” pattern. ??? )
I didn’t downvote it because it was a plausible-sounding suggestion which led to a clarifying discussion, but my guess is that some downvoted it for giving a somewhat irrelevant/misleading answer. As Adele_L explains, heat loss pertains to the Second Law, while the proposed setup has the more fundamental problem of violating the First Law and even assuming away heat loss does not work because of gravitational redshift, as Plasmon explains.