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A number of comments refer to the “supernatural” while others raise the notions of entropy, suggesting that the thought experiment is about getting something fo
by PeterWhittaker 6y ago
A number of comments refer to the “supernatural” while others raise the notions of entropy, suggesting that the thought experiment is about getting something for nothing.
Even from the very early days, both notions were laughable, and both missed the point. The question has to do more with what sort of entity/agent/machine the demon would be, what its physical characteristics would be.
Since Bennett’s work of 1982, building on Landauer’s work of 1961 (both mentioned in the article), we know that the demon is an information processing machine, observing and recording state, occasionally acting, and occasionally erasing its state records.
The question is how efficient can we make the machine, how passive or active it needs to be.
Potential applications include more efficient cooling systems and advances in the theory and mathematics of information processing.
- PeterWhittaker 6y agoSorry for the auto-reply, but I got thinking more deeply after writing this, and realized I missed a key point.... Maxwell’s Demon was an artful and subtle and unexpected recognition that 19th century physics and mathematics had neither concepts nor expressive capabilities to even describe what was happening. I marvel at the intuition and cleverness involved: “here is a thing, so simple to describe, that we do not even have the rudiments necessary to explore, let alone explain”. To take an inchoate notion of a major gap and express it so simply, so memorably, is a masterstroke.
- ttz 6y agoMaxwell was - to put it mildly - a pretty bright guy.
- Nomentatus 6y agoEvaporation is pretty efficient, as a sorting device. It also doesn't involve computation. But it gets the Demon's job done.