MAXWELL'S DEMON
- + Add to Faves
- + Translate
- + Share
العربية
ä¸å›½
Français
Deutsch
Ελληνική
हिनà¥à¤¦à¥€
Italiano
日本語
Português
РуÑÑкий
Español
'Maxwell's demon' is an 1867 thought experiment by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, meant to raise questions about the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics forbids (due to statistical improbability) two bodies of equal temperature, brought in contact with each other and isolated from the rest of the Universe, from evolving to a state in which one of the two has a significantly higher temperature than the other. The second law is also expressed as the assertion that in an isolated system, entropy never decreases. Maxwell described his thought experiment in this way[1]:
In other words, Maxwell imagines two containers, ''A'' and ''B''. The containers are filled with the same gas at equal temperatures and placed next to each other. Observing the molecules on both sides, a little "demon" guards a trapdoor between the two containers. When a faster-than-average molecule from ''A'' flies towards the trapdoor, the demon opens it, and the molecule will fly from ''A'' to ''B''. The average speed of the molecules in ''B'' will have increased while in ''A'' they will have slowed down on average. However, since average molecular speed corresponds to temperature, the temperature will have decreased in ''A'' and increased in ''B''; this is contrary to the second law of thermodynamics.
Maxwell's thought experiment has troubled physicists since he first published it.
:''Is Maxwell correct?''
:''Could such a demon, as he describes it, actually violate the second law?''
Several physicists have presented calculations that show that the second law of thermodynamics will not actually be violated, if a more complete analysis is made of the whole system including the demon. The essence of the physical argument is to show by calculation that any demon must "generate" more entropy segregating the molecules than it could ever eliminate by the method described. That is, it would take more effort to gauge the speed of the molecules and allow them to selectively pass through the opening between A and B than the amount of energy saved by the difference of temperature caused by this.
One of the most famous responses to this question was suggested in 1929 by Leó Szilárd and later by Léon Brillouin. Szilárd pointed out that a real-life Maxwell's demon would need to have some means of measuring molecular speed, and that the act of acquiring information would require an expenditure of energy. The second law states that the total entropy of an isolated system must increase. Since the demon and the gas are interacting, we must consider the total entropy of the gas and the demon combined. The expenditure of energy by the demon will cause an increase in the entropy of the demon, which will be larger than the lowering of the entropy of the gas. For example, if the demon is checking molecular positions using a flashlight, the flashlight battery is a low-entropy device, a chemical reaction waiting to happen. As its energy is used up emitting photons (whose entropy must now be counted as well), the battery's chemical reaction will proceed and its entropy will increase, more than offsetting the decrease in the entropy of the gas.
Szilárd's insight was expanded upon in 1982 by Charles H. Bennett. In 1960, Rolf Landauer realized that certain measurements need not increase thermodynamic entropy as long as they were thermodynamically reversible. Due to the connection between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy, this also meant that the recorded measurement must not be erased. In other words, to determine what side of the gate a molecule must be on, the demon must store information about the state of the molecule. Bennett showed that, however well prepared, eventually the demon will run out of information storage space and must begin to erase the information it has previously gathered. Erasing information is a thermodynamically irreversible process that increases the entropy of a system.[2]
Put simply, no matter how it is done, both the act of the demon watching molecules and the act of opening and closing the trapdoor is by definition ''work'' and requires the expenditure of energy. These explanations, however, are inadequate as the concept of the demon is not stated and may work as described below.
Real-life versions of Maxwellian demons occur, but all such "real demons" have their entropy-lowering effects duly balanced by increase of entropy elsewhere.
Single-atom traps used by particle physicists allow an experimenter to control the state of individual quanta in a way similar to Maxwell's demon.
Molecular-sized mechanisms are no longer found only in biology; they are also the subject of the emerging field of nanotechnology.
A large-scale, commercially-available pneumatic device, called a Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube separates hot and cold air. It sorts molecules by exploiting the conservation of angular momentum: hotter molecules are spun to the outside of the tube while cooler molecules spin in a tighter whirl within the tube. Gas from the two different temperature whirls may be vented on opposite ends of the tube. Although this creates a temperature difference, the energy to do so is supplied by the pressure driving the gas through the tube.
If hypothetical mirror matter exists, demons can be envisaged which can act like perpetuum mobiles of the second kind: extract heat energy from only one reservoir, use it to do work and be isolated from the rest of ordinary world. Yet the Second Law is not violated because the demons pay their entropy cost in the hidden (mirror) sector of the world by emitting mirror photons.
In the 1 February, 2007 issue of Nature, David Leigh, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, announced the creation of a nano-device based on this thought experiment. This device is able to drive a chemical system out of equilibrium, but it must be powered by an external source (light in this case) and therefore does not violate thermodynamics.
Previously, other researchers created a ring-shaped molecule which could be placed on an axle connecting two sites (called A and B). Particles from either site would bump into the ring and move it from end to end. If a large collection of these devices were placed in a system, half of the devices had the ring at site A and half at B at any given moment in time.
Leigh made a minor change to the axle so that if a light is shone on the device, the center of the axle will thicken, thus restricting the motion of the ring. It only keeps the ring from moving, however, if it is at site A. Over time, therefore, the rings will be bumped from site B to site A and get stuck there, creating an imbalance in the system. In his experiments, Leigh was able to take a pot of "billions of these devices" from 50:50 equilibrium to a 70:30 imbalance within a few minutes.[3]
Historian Henry Brooks Adams in his manuscript ''The Rule of Phase Applied to History'' attempted to use Maxwell's demon as an historical metaphor, though he seems to have misunderstood and misapplied the principle.[4] Adams interpreted history as a process moving towards "equilibrium", but he saw militaristic nations (he felt Germany pre-eminent in this class) as tending to reverse this process, a Maxwell's Demon of history. Adams made many attempts to respond to the criticism of his formulation from his scientific colleagues, but the work remained incomplete at Adams' death in 1918. It was only published posthumously. [5]
★ Maxwell's demon contributes to the thesis of Ken Kesey's collection of stories, ''The Demon Box''.
★ Maxwell's demon appears in Thomas Pynchon's novel, ''The Crying of Lot 49''.
★ Maxwell's demon appears in George Gamow's ''Mr. Tompkins''.
★ Maxwell's demon makes appearances in the popular manga ''Oh My Goddess!'' by Kosuke Fujishima as a spirit capable of generating what amounts to a miniature ramjet.
★ Maxwell's demon, nicknamed "Max", makes appearances in the fantasy series ''A Wizard in Rhyme'' by Christopher Stasheff. In addition to being the personification of entropy, the demon was also dubbed the Spirit of Perversity and held enormous power over entropy-driven effects. Maxwell's demon also makes cameo appearances in other Stasheff novels, such as St. Vidicon to the Rescue.
★ Maxwell's demon is mentioned in the Novel ''Homo Faber'' by Swiss author Max Frisch, as well as in one of the short stories of ''The Cyberiad'' by StanisÅ‚aw Lem: "The Sixth Sally, or How Trurl and Klaupacius Created a Demon of the Second Kind to Defeat the Pirate Pugg".
★ Isaac Asimov and Larry Niven have also each written a short story in homage to Maxwell. Additionally, Larry Niven's Warlock in The Magic Goes Away uses such a demon to cool his home in a vignette titled "Unfinished Story" as published in "Playgrounds of the Mind".
★ Some Windows releases came with a very simple game called "Maxwell's Maniac", in which you play the part of Maxwell's Demon by moving a sliding door to try to coax red molecules to one side of a chamber and blue molecules to the other.
★ Maxwell's Demon becomes an argument for ''The User Illusion'' by Tor Norretranders.
★ Maxwell Demon was the name of Brian Eno's first band, which was the inspiration for the name of a fictional character in the movie ''Velvet Goldmine.''
★ ''Maxwell's Demon'' is the name of a 1968 film by the American experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton.
★ ''Maxwell's Demon'' is a villain in the fictional cartoon show 'Captain Baseball Bat Boy', featured in the video game ''. During the game, a character is quizzed on his knowledge of the show to save his life. The question being "Who was the original creator of Maxwell's Demon?", the character cited both the Captain Baseball bat-boy character who created the demon, as well as the show's writer, but was killed for not answering "James Clerk Maxwell".
★ In August 08, 2005 strip of the webcomic Mac Hall, a hallucinated Maxwell's Demon is found in the air conditioner.
★ Maxwell's Demon appears, and fills his typical role, in the climax of the book ''Master of the Five Magics'' by Lyndon Hardy.
★ In the manga '', one of the Gundam engineers associates Duo Maxwell's last name with Maxwell's demon. [6]
★ Maxwell's Demon is mentioned in the song 'A Metaphysical Drama', by Vintersorg.
★ Maxwell's Demon is the name of a New Jersey based indie rock band.
★ Maxwell's Daemon is also the name of a London alt-pop band.
★ The Strugatsky brothers novel ''Monday Begins on Saturday'' includes a fictional representation of two "Maxwell's demons" guarding a gate.
★ Maxwell's demon is referenced by the main character's name in Tonia Walden's webcomic ''Maxwell the demon''.
★ Maxwell Demon is not the name of an indie rock band located in Hawthorne, California.
★ In Greg Egan's hard science fiction novel ''Permutation City'', Maxwell's Demon is the name of a program used by the character Maria to keep track of individual "molecules" in the cellular automaton known as the Autoverse.
★ Laplace's demon
★ Evaporation
★ Thermionic emission
★ Photoelectric effect
★ Joule-Thomson effect
★ Hall effect
★ Mass spectrometry
★ Dispersion
★ Catalysis
★ Quantum tunneling
★ Gibbs paradox
1. Maxwell (1871), reprinted in Leff & Rex (1990) at p.4
2. http://www.ulearntoday.com/magazine/physics_article1.jsp?FILE=maxwelldemon
3. A demon of a device
4. Cater (1947), ''pp''640-647, see also the paper by Daub (1970) reprinted in Leff & Rex (1990), ''pp''37-51.
5. Adams (1919), p.267
6. , , Sumisawa, Katsuyuki, Action/VIZ, ,
# Physical entropy and information entropy
★ University of Edinburgh's recent findings on soon-to-be-possible Maxwell's Demon
★ Sciencenews.org article about Maxwell's Demon
★ The Degradation of the Democractic Dogma, Adams, H., , , Kessinger, 1919, ISBN 1-4179-1598-6
★ Bennet, C.H. (1987) "Demons, Engines and the Second Law", ''Scientific American'', November, ''pp''108-116
★ Henry Adams and his Friends, Cater, H.D (ed.), , , Boston, 1947,
★ Atomism and Thermodynamics, Daub, E.E., , , Isis, 1967
★ Feynman Lectures on Computation, Feynmann, R.P. ''et al.'', , , Addison-Wesley, 1996, ISBN 0-14-028451-6 , ''pp''148-150
★ Henry Adams: Scientific Historian, Jordy, W.H., , , New Haven, 1952, ISBN 0-685-26683-4
★ Maxwell's Demon: Entropy, Information, Computing, Leff, H.S. & Rex, A.F. (eds), , , Adam-Hilger, 1990, ISBN 0-7503-0057-4 , may be out of print but contains several papers not in 2003 edition.
★ Maxwell's Demon 2: Entropy, Classical and Quantum Information, Computing, -, , , Institute of Physics, 2003, ISBN 0-7503-0759-5 , Contents - an anthology and comprehensive bibliography of academic papers pertaining to Maxwell's demon and related topics. Chapter 1 provides a historical overview of the demon's origin and solutions to the paradox.
★ Theory of Heat, Maxwell, J.C., , , , 1871, , reprinted (2001) New York: Dover, ISBN 0-486-41735-2
Maxwell's thought experiment
The Second Law of Thermodynamics forbids (due to statistical improbability) two bodies of equal temperature, brought in contact with each other and isolated from the rest of the Universe, from evolving to a state in which one of the two has a significantly higher temperature than the other. The second law is also expressed as the assertion that in an isolated system, entropy never decreases. Maxwell described his thought experiment in this way[1]:
Schematic figure of Maxwell's demon
In other words, Maxwell imagines two containers, ''A'' and ''B''. The containers are filled with the same gas at equal temperatures and placed next to each other. Observing the molecules on both sides, a little "demon" guards a trapdoor between the two containers. When a faster-than-average molecule from ''A'' flies towards the trapdoor, the demon opens it, and the molecule will fly from ''A'' to ''B''. The average speed of the molecules in ''B'' will have increased while in ''A'' they will have slowed down on average. However, since average molecular speed corresponds to temperature, the temperature will have decreased in ''A'' and increased in ''B''; this is contrary to the second law of thermodynamics.
Criticism and development
Maxwell's thought experiment has troubled physicists since he first published it.
:''Is Maxwell correct?''
:''Could such a demon, as he describes it, actually violate the second law?''
Several physicists have presented calculations that show that the second law of thermodynamics will not actually be violated, if a more complete analysis is made of the whole system including the demon. The essence of the physical argument is to show by calculation that any demon must "generate" more entropy segregating the molecules than it could ever eliminate by the method described. That is, it would take more effort to gauge the speed of the molecules and allow them to selectively pass through the opening between A and B than the amount of energy saved by the difference of temperature caused by this.
One of the most famous responses to this question was suggested in 1929 by Leó Szilárd and later by Léon Brillouin. Szilárd pointed out that a real-life Maxwell's demon would need to have some means of measuring molecular speed, and that the act of acquiring information would require an expenditure of energy. The second law states that the total entropy of an isolated system must increase. Since the demon and the gas are interacting, we must consider the total entropy of the gas and the demon combined. The expenditure of energy by the demon will cause an increase in the entropy of the demon, which will be larger than the lowering of the entropy of the gas. For example, if the demon is checking molecular positions using a flashlight, the flashlight battery is a low-entropy device, a chemical reaction waiting to happen. As its energy is used up emitting photons (whose entropy must now be counted as well), the battery's chemical reaction will proceed and its entropy will increase, more than offsetting the decrease in the entropy of the gas.
Szilárd's insight was expanded upon in 1982 by Charles H. Bennett. In 1960, Rolf Landauer realized that certain measurements need not increase thermodynamic entropy as long as they were thermodynamically reversible. Due to the connection between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy, this also meant that the recorded measurement must not be erased. In other words, to determine what side of the gate a molecule must be on, the demon must store information about the state of the molecule. Bennett showed that, however well prepared, eventually the demon will run out of information storage space and must begin to erase the information it has previously gathered. Erasing information is a thermodynamically irreversible process that increases the entropy of a system.[2]
Put simply, no matter how it is done, both the act of the demon watching molecules and the act of opening and closing the trapdoor is by definition ''work'' and requires the expenditure of energy. These explanations, however, are inadequate as the concept of the demon is not stated and may work as described below.
Applications
Real-life versions of Maxwellian demons occur, but all such "real demons" have their entropy-lowering effects duly balanced by increase of entropy elsewhere.
Single-atom traps used by particle physicists allow an experimenter to control the state of individual quanta in a way similar to Maxwell's demon.
Molecular-sized mechanisms are no longer found only in biology; they are also the subject of the emerging field of nanotechnology.
A large-scale, commercially-available pneumatic device, called a Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube separates hot and cold air. It sorts molecules by exploiting the conservation of angular momentum: hotter molecules are spun to the outside of the tube while cooler molecules spin in a tighter whirl within the tube. Gas from the two different temperature whirls may be vented on opposite ends of the tube. Although this creates a temperature difference, the energy to do so is supplied by the pressure driving the gas through the tube.
If hypothetical mirror matter exists, demons can be envisaged which can act like perpetuum mobiles of the second kind: extract heat energy from only one reservoir, use it to do work and be isolated from the rest of ordinary world. Yet the Second Law is not violated because the demons pay their entropy cost in the hidden (mirror) sector of the world by emitting mirror photons.
Experimental work based on Maxwell's Demon
In the 1 February, 2007 issue of Nature, David Leigh, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, announced the creation of a nano-device based on this thought experiment. This device is able to drive a chemical system out of equilibrium, but it must be powered by an external source (light in this case) and therefore does not violate thermodynamics.
Previously, other researchers created a ring-shaped molecule which could be placed on an axle connecting two sites (called A and B). Particles from either site would bump into the ring and move it from end to end. If a large collection of these devices were placed in a system, half of the devices had the ring at site A and half at B at any given moment in time.
Leigh made a minor change to the axle so that if a light is shone on the device, the center of the axle will thicken, thus restricting the motion of the ring. It only keeps the ring from moving, however, if it is at site A. Over time, therefore, the rings will be bumped from site B to site A and get stuck there, creating an imbalance in the system. In his experiments, Leigh was able to take a pot of "billions of these devices" from 50:50 equilibrium to a 70:30 imbalance within a few minutes.[3]
Adams and the demon as historical metaphor
Historian Henry Brooks Adams in his manuscript ''The Rule of Phase Applied to History'' attempted to use Maxwell's demon as an historical metaphor, though he seems to have misunderstood and misapplied the principle.[4] Adams interpreted history as a process moving towards "equilibrium", but he saw militaristic nations (he felt Germany pre-eminent in this class) as tending to reverse this process, a Maxwell's Demon of history. Adams made many attempts to respond to the criticism of his formulation from his scientific colleagues, but the work remained incomplete at Adams' death in 1918. It was only published posthumously. [5]
Maxwell's demon in popular culture
★ Maxwell's demon contributes to the thesis of Ken Kesey's collection of stories, ''The Demon Box''.
★ Maxwell's demon appears in Thomas Pynchon's novel, ''The Crying of Lot 49''.
★ Maxwell's demon appears in George Gamow's ''Mr. Tompkins''.
★ Maxwell's demon makes appearances in the popular manga ''Oh My Goddess!'' by Kosuke Fujishima as a spirit capable of generating what amounts to a miniature ramjet.
★ Maxwell's demon, nicknamed "Max", makes appearances in the fantasy series ''A Wizard in Rhyme'' by Christopher Stasheff. In addition to being the personification of entropy, the demon was also dubbed the Spirit of Perversity and held enormous power over entropy-driven effects. Maxwell's demon also makes cameo appearances in other Stasheff novels, such as St. Vidicon to the Rescue.
★ Maxwell's demon is mentioned in the Novel ''Homo Faber'' by Swiss author Max Frisch, as well as in one of the short stories of ''The Cyberiad'' by StanisÅ‚aw Lem: "The Sixth Sally, or How Trurl and Klaupacius Created a Demon of the Second Kind to Defeat the Pirate Pugg".
★ Isaac Asimov and Larry Niven have also each written a short story in homage to Maxwell. Additionally, Larry Niven's Warlock in The Magic Goes Away uses such a demon to cool his home in a vignette titled "Unfinished Story" as published in "Playgrounds of the Mind".
★ Some Windows releases came with a very simple game called "Maxwell's Maniac", in which you play the part of Maxwell's Demon by moving a sliding door to try to coax red molecules to one side of a chamber and blue molecules to the other.
★ Maxwell's Demon becomes an argument for ''The User Illusion'' by Tor Norretranders.
★ Maxwell Demon was the name of Brian Eno's first band, which was the inspiration for the name of a fictional character in the movie ''Velvet Goldmine.''
★ ''Maxwell's Demon'' is the name of a 1968 film by the American experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton.
★ ''Maxwell's Demon'' is a villain in the fictional cartoon show 'Captain Baseball Bat Boy', featured in the video game ''. During the game, a character is quizzed on his knowledge of the show to save his life. The question being "Who was the original creator of Maxwell's Demon?", the character cited both the Captain Baseball bat-boy character who created the demon, as well as the show's writer, but was killed for not answering "James Clerk Maxwell".
★ In August 08, 2005 strip of the webcomic Mac Hall, a hallucinated Maxwell's Demon is found in the air conditioner.
★ Maxwell's Demon appears, and fills his typical role, in the climax of the book ''Master of the Five Magics'' by Lyndon Hardy.
★ In the manga '', one of the Gundam engineers associates Duo Maxwell's last name with Maxwell's demon. [6]
★ Maxwell's Demon is mentioned in the song 'A Metaphysical Drama', by Vintersorg.
★ Maxwell's Demon is the name of a New Jersey based indie rock band.
★ Maxwell's Daemon is also the name of a London alt-pop band.
★ The Strugatsky brothers novel ''Monday Begins on Saturday'' includes a fictional representation of two "Maxwell's demons" guarding a gate.
★ Maxwell's demon is referenced by the main character's name in Tonia Walden's webcomic ''Maxwell the demon''.
★ Maxwell Demon is not the name of an indie rock band located in Hawthorne, California.
★ In Greg Egan's hard science fiction novel ''Permutation City'', Maxwell's Demon is the name of a program used by the character Maria to keep track of individual "molecules" in the cellular automaton known as the Autoverse.
See also
★ Laplace's demon
★ Evaporation
★ Thermionic emission
★ Photoelectric effect
★ Joule-Thomson effect
★ Hall effect
★ Mass spectrometry
★ Dispersion
★ Catalysis
★ Quantum tunneling
★ Gibbs paradox
Notes
1. Maxwell (1871), reprinted in Leff & Rex (1990) at p.4
2. http://www.ulearntoday.com/magazine/physics_article1.jsp?FILE=maxwelldemon
3. A demon of a device
4. Cater (1947), ''pp''640-647, see also the paper by Daub (1970) reprinted in Leff & Rex (1990), ''pp''37-51.
5. Adams (1919), p.267
6. , , Sumisawa, Katsuyuki, Action/VIZ, ,
# Physical entropy and information entropy
External links and bibliography
★ University of Edinburgh's recent findings on soon-to-be-possible Maxwell's Demon
★ Sciencenews.org article about Maxwell's Demon
★ The Degradation of the Democractic Dogma, Adams, H., , , Kessinger, 1919, ISBN 1-4179-1598-6
★ Bennet, C.H. (1987) "Demons, Engines and the Second Law", ''Scientific American'', November, ''pp''108-116
★ Henry Adams and his Friends, Cater, H.D (ed.), , , Boston, 1947,
★ Atomism and Thermodynamics, Daub, E.E., , , Isis, 1967
★ Feynman Lectures on Computation, Feynmann, R.P. ''et al.'', , , Addison-Wesley, 1996, ISBN 0-14-028451-6 , ''pp''148-150
★ Henry Adams: Scientific Historian, Jordy, W.H., , , New Haven, 1952, ISBN 0-685-26683-4
★ Maxwell's Demon: Entropy, Information, Computing, Leff, H.S. & Rex, A.F. (eds), , , Adam-Hilger, 1990, ISBN 0-7503-0057-4 , may be out of print but contains several papers not in 2003 edition.
★ Maxwell's Demon 2: Entropy, Classical and Quantum Information, Computing, -, , , Institute of Physics, 2003, ISBN 0-7503-0759-5 , Contents - an anthology and comprehensive bibliography of academic papers pertaining to Maxwell's demon and related topics. Chapter 1 provides a historical overview of the demon's origin and solutions to the paradox.
★ Theory of Heat, Maxwell, J.C., , , , 1871, , reprinted (2001) New York: Dover, ISBN 0-486-41735-2
This article provided by Wikipedia. To edit the contents of this article, click here for original source.
psst.. try this: add to faves
