By Andrew F. Rex
Approximately a hundred and twenty years in the past, James Clerk Maxwell brought his now mythical hypothetical 'demon' as a problem to the integrity of the second one legislation of thermodynamics. Fascination with the demon continued during the improvement of statistical and quantum physics, info thought and laptop science-and hyperlinks were tested among Maxwell's demon and every of those disciplines. The demon's seductive caliber makes it attractive to actual scientists, engineers, desktop scientists, biologists, psychologists, and historians and philosophers of technology. This publication, Maxwell's Demon: Entropy, info, Computing, brings less than one conceal twenty-five reprints, together with seminal works by way of James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson; old experiences via Martin Klein, Edward Daub and Peter Heimann; very important contributions via Leo Szilard, Leon Brillouin, Dennis Gabor and Jerome Rothstein; and memorable techniques by way of Rolf Landauer and Charles Bennett. formerly this significant fabric has been scattered all through assorted journals. Maxwell's Demon: Entropy, details, Computing makes the foremost literature simply on hand and is helping with the cross-fertilisation of principles in several disciplines. An annotated chronological bibliography offers a colorful viewpoint on Maxwell's demon and a wealthy path of citations for extra research. to be had from Princeton collage Press within the united states, Canada and Japan.
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Additional resources for Maxwell's Demon: Entropy, Information, Computing
Sample text
Penrose wrote: The large number of distinct observational states that the Maxwell demon must have in order to make significant entropy reductions possible may be thought of as a large memory capacity in which the demon stores the information about the system which he acquires as he works reducing its entropy. As soon as the demon's memory is completely filled, however, . . he can achieve no further reduction of the Boltzmann entropy. He gains nothing for example, by deliberately forgetting or erasing some of his stored information in order to make more memory capacity available; for the erasure being a setting process, itself increases the entropy by an amount at least as great as the entropy decrease made possible by the newly available memory capacity.
Resolution of the Maxwell's demon puzzle by information acquisition was an important phase of the demon's life. It is interesting that the focus on information acquisition seemed to eliminate all interest in the memory aspects that Szilard emphasized. This is nowhere more clear than in Brillouin's decision to define two types of information, one of which ('free' information, If) was designed explicitly to deal with 'knowledge', and the other ('bound' information, Ib) was linked to entropy changes.
The ingenuity of Szilard's engine is striking. His tractable model allows thermodynamic analysis and interpretation, but at the same time entails a binary decision process. Thus, long before the existence of modern information ideas and the computer age, Szilard had the foresight to focus attention on the 'information' associated with a binary process. In doing so he discovered what is now called the binary digitor 'bit'of information. Szilard's observation that an inanimate device could effect the required tasksobviating the need to analyze the thermodynamics of complex biological systemswas a precursor to cybernetics.