Discussion on "frontiers of the second law"

This article reports an open discussion that took place during the Keenan Symposium "Meeting the Entropy Challenge" (held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 4, 2007) following the short presentations - each reported as a separate article in the present, volume - by Adrian Bejan, Bjarne Andresen, Miguel Rubi, Signe Kjelstrup, David Jou, Miroslav Grmela, Lyndsay Gordon, and Eric Schneider. All panelists and the audience were asked to address the following questions Is the second law relevant when we trap single ions, prepare, manipulate and measure single photons, excite single atoms, induce spin echoes, measure quantum entanglement? Is it possible or impossible to build Maxwell demons that beat the second law by exploiting fluctuations? Is the maximum entropy generation principle capable of unifying nonequilibrium molecular dynamics, chemical kinetics, nonlocal and nonequilibrium. rheology, biological systems, natural structures, and cosmological evolution? Research in quantum computation and quantum information has raised many fundamental questions about the foundations of quantum theory. Are any of these questions related to the second law? © 2008 American Institute of Physics.