Maxwell's Demon

Maxwell’s Demon

Maxwell’s demon is meant to support the possibility of disobeying the second law of thermodynamics. The second law focuses on two bodies with different temperature which when collided and isolated will result to a thermal equilibrium or having those two bodies almost the same temperature. He thinks of two containers with molecules of the same gas at equal temperature and where near to each other. An imaginary demon is on the boundary of the two http://cam.qubit.org/articles/intros/com groups guarding a trapdoor. In reality, entropy should not decrease in an isolated system. But on

Maxwell’s thoughts, the demon will open the door if a faster than normal molecule moves near the door letting that molecule to enter from container A to container B. This will result to a change in the average movement of electrons on both containers. Container A will have descended in its temperature while container B will have an increase on temperature. This contradicts the definition of entropy which is the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is defined as the amount of thermal energy not available to do work. Since no work has done to transfer that excited molecule, only the demon had made a way to do that. 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.

-http: //www.auburn.edu/~smith01/notes/maxde m.htm

Johnny Sausa, four calcium