3 ms·

I thought the demon didn't violate the 2nd law because it required an infusion of information/energy to operate that is larger than the energy that can be harne

• mrfusion 8y ago
  Ive always mused that batteries of the future would hold information instead of energy. Presumably with something like a Maxwell’s demon to turn the information into energy?
  • abdullahkhalids 8y ago
    That is exactly incorrect - and exactly what your parent was talking about. It is impossible to turn information into energy. Because it takes more energy to gain and use the information than you can extract from the system. We will never have such batteries if our current understanding of physics is correct.
• abdullahkhalids 8y ago
  That is indeed true and the actual paper [1] makes this clear. The point of the work is to demonstrate the one aspect of Maxwell's demon that was always scientifically possible, but was technologically impossible in Maxwell's time. The demon could sort individual microscopic particles based on some of their properties. These guys have a lattice of atoms and they show that they have the tech to move these atoms around the lattice at will. You can delete the Maxwell demon part of the whole discussion and what they do is still pretty impressive. Unfortunately, to publish in Nature these days you need a catchy story which is why you see it. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0458-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0458-7 The abstract and the discussion are fairly readable.