Maxwell’s Demon

نویسندگان

  • Kirk T. McDonald
  • Joseph Henry
چکیده

This problem is prob. 2 of [1]. One of the earliest conceptual “supercomputers” was Maxwell’s Demon [2], who uses intelligence in sorting molecules to appear to evade the Second Law of Thermodynamics. To place the demon in a computational context, consider a computer “memory” that consists of a set of boxes (bits), each of volume V and each containing a single molecule. A (re)movable partition divides the volume into “left” and “right” halves. If the molecule is in the left half of a box this represents the 0 state, while if the molecule is in the right half of a box we have the 1 state.

برای دانلود رایگان متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

All Shook Up: Fluctuations, Maxwell's Demon and the Thermodynamics of Computation

The most successful exorcism of Maxwell’s demon is Smoluchowski’s 1912 observation that thermal fluctuations would likely disrupt the operation of any molecular-scale demonic machine. A later tradition sought to exorcise Maxwell’s demon by assessing the entropic cost of the demon’s processing of information. This later tradition fails since these same thermal fluctuations invalidate the molecul...

متن کامل

Colloquium: The physics of Maxwell’s demon and information

Maxwell’s demon was born in 1867 and still thrives in modern physics. He plays important roles in clarifying the connections between two theories: thermodynamics and information. Here the history of the demon and a variety of interesting consequences of the second law of thermodynamics are presented, mainly in quantum mechanics, but also in the theory of gravity. Also highlighted are some of th...

متن کامل

Chapter 2 Review of Maxwell ’ s Demon

The paradox of Maxwell’s demon was proposed in a letter from James C. Maxwell to Peter G. Tait for the first time. In the letter, Maxwell mentioned his gedankenexperiment of “a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule” [1]. The being may be like a tiny fairy, and may violate the second law of thermodynamics. In 1874, William Thomson, who is also well-known as Lor...

متن کامل

Maxwell's Demon - A Historical Review

For more than 140 years Maxwell’s demon has intrigued, enlightened, mystified, frustrated, and challenged physicists in unique and interesting ways. Maxwell’s original conception was brilliant and insightful, but over the years numerous different versions of Maxwell’s demon have been presented. Most versions have been answered with reasonable physical arguments, with each of these answers (appa...

متن کامل

A Collision Between Dynamics and Thermodynamics

Philosophers of science have found the literature surrounding Maxwell’s demon deeply problematic. This paper explains why, summarizing various philosophical complaints and adding to them. The first part of the paper critically evaluates attempts to exorcise Maxwell’s demon; the second part raises foundational questions about some of the putative demons that are being summoned.

متن کامل

Conditioning, Correlation and Entropy Generation in Maxwell's Demon

Maxwell’s Demon conspires to use information about the state of a confined molecule in a Szilard engine (randomly frozen into a state subspace by his own actions) to derive work from a single-temperature heat bath. It is widely accepted that, if the Demon can achieve this at all, he can do so without violating the Second Law only because of a counterbalancing price that must be paid to erase in...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2008