Discussion on "Foundations 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) follow-ing the short presentations - each reported as a separate article in the present volume - by Seth Lloyd, Owen Maroney, Silviu Guiasu, Ping Ao, Jochen Gemmer, Bernard Guy, Gian Paolo Beretta, Speranta Gheorghiu-Svirschevski, and Dorion Sagan. All panelists and the audience were asked to address the following questions Why is the second law true? Is it an inviolable law of nature? If not, is it possible to develop a perpetual motion machine of the second kind? Are second law limitations objective or subjective, real or apparent, due to the nature of physical states or the representation and manipulation of information? Is entropy a physical property in the same sense as energy is universally understood to be an intrinsic property of matter? Does the second law conflict with quantum mechanics? Are the differences between mechanical and thermodynamic descriptions of physical phenomena reconcilable? Does the reversible law of motion of hamiltonian mechanics and quantum, mechanics conflict with the empirical observation of irreversible phenomena? © 2008 American Institute of Physics.