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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110074 http://news.ycombinato
by aswanson 18y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110074 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110074
- yters 18y agoThanks, those are interesting links. Still, nothing there that seems especially compelling. Maxwell's demon assumes the energy cost for sorting the molecules is less than the net gain. That looks like another variant of the perpetual motion machine. The fluctuation theorem says the 2nd law doesn't hold for very, very small entities, but its probability of being correct climbs exponentially as the system scales. So, it is fallacious to then say the 2nd law may not hold at the macro level due to it not holding at the micro level, since the theorem used to support this idea is itself an instance of the idea being false.