[klipt]

> Blindly saying "thermodynamics" and not critically thinking about how/where/why it applies is intellectually deficient.

Not necessarily. In some cases it's a more efficient use of time to place the burden of proof on the person challenging a widely held assumption. Especially if you're a physicist who regularly receives letters from cranks with no background experience claiming to have overthrown physics. If you analyzed all of them in detail you'd never have time to do any real work.

Should people challenge assumptions? Sure. Are you required to challenge every assumption at every conceivable opportunity? No, that's OCD behaviour.

Does my attitude stifle progress? I don't think so - if someone has a way around the second law they should be able to build a machine utilizing it, and empirical data beats thought experiments every time.

Incidentally, the second law as commonly phrased "entropy always increases" is only an approximation. Entropy can decrease at times with small probabilities as outlined by the Fluctuation Theorem.

[pyre]

> Should people challenge assumptions? Sure. Are you required to challenge every assumption at every conceivable opportunity? No, that's OCD behaviour.

Sorry that I was unclear. The parent post seemed to be implying that anyone that comes up with a perpetual motion thought experiment should just have the phrase "can't exist it would violate thermodynamics" tossed at it. I'm not advocating working out every thought experiment that anyone could come up with, but to workout none of them is just putting blind faith in the law of thermodynamics. And so far as I understand it, blind-faith is not supposed to be part of the scientific process.