Recent content by lifestil

Oops, I should have said for point 1) All that matters is an energy balance and maintaining the blackbody spectrum on a reasonable time scale.

By the way, the 2nd law has already been violated experimentally at small time-energy scales. It is true that it is statistical in nature, but in every case, it eventually wins. So I wouldn't add "probable" to the 2nd law, but merely the caveat that it (like energy conservation) can be broken...

Fundamentally, emissivity and absorption are time symmetric--the process looks identical forward and backwards--because the mechanism in blackbody radiation is time reversal invariant. Blackbody radiation is derived using an EM field in thermal equilibrium with quantum oscillators. The...