Comments on Violations of the Second Law

Abstract

The authors of Ref. [1] claim to have experimental verification of violations of the second law of thermodynamics based on the assertions: (i) "for large systems and over long times the entropy production rate is necessarily positive"; (ii) Loschmidt's paradox interpreted as indicating that entropy production can be both positive and negative; (iii) and violations of the second law for small systems over short time scales predicted by the fluctuation theorem FT [2]. Neither the claim nor the assertions are correct.