Scientists have figured out how to harness Brownian motion – literally the thermal energy of individual molecules – to make electricity, by cleverly connecting diodes up to pieces of graphene, which are atom-thick sheets of Carbon. The team has successfully demonstrated their theory (which was previously thought to be impossible by prominent physicists like Richard Feynman), and are now trying to make a kind of micro-harvester that can basically produce inexhaustible power for things like smart sensors.
The most impressive thing about the system is that it doesn’t require a thermal gradient to do work, like other kinds of heat-harvesting systems (Stirling engines, Peltier junctions, etc.). As long as it’s a bit above absolute zero, there’s enough thermal energy “in the system” to make the graphene vibrate continuously, which induces a current that the diodes can then pump out.
Original journal link: https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.108.024130
I think this is it exactly, and in fact I found a Science Daily article that explains the cleverness of it (your assumption about the time scale is correct, and they have a clever arrangement of diodes that let you kind of “pump” the charge out). They specifically mention not violating the 2nd Law too :)
A law is only effective if the majority is following it. But we will never escape this system if we follow the rules of the system itself. I’m calling for scientists to finally just break the laws of thermodynamics!
I recall watching a video about this a few months ago. Their explanation of how this doesn’t violate the law of increasing entropy was not satisfactory:
They ran a computer simulation of their model that showed 0 entropy at the beginning then a huge spike and then an asymptotic approach to a steady state value. Since the steady state value wasn’t zero they said “look entropy increased (from zero to some value) we don’t violate the law of entropy”.
The initial entropy value of zero was because of fixed starting conditions ie at fixed starting conditions entropy is zero because you’ve defined the state everything is in. Once I figured out this have waving I lost interest.