Be the Maxwell's Demon

While reading up on Shannon's Entropy and Information Theory today I chanced upon the term "Maxwell's Demon". A term like this i find to be irresistible, so there I went to Wikipedia to read up and holy mother of god guess what did i find...??

Before venturing further allow me a discourse on Maxwell's Demon. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system, which is not in an equilibrium, will increase over time to reach a maximum when the system attains equilibrium. But why does this happen? According to Maxwell it was because of statistical improbability. Let me elaborate, suppose there is a container with an opaque, insulating partition in between. Both partitions are filled up with the same gas; however there is no way the gases can mix or temperature change because of the partition. If the gases are at different temperatures then they will remain in the same state because this system is defined to be an isolated system.

If there was a small hole in the partition then the gases would start to mix, there would be temperature exchange and before long the gases will be in equilibrium, as would be expected by anyone familiar with second law of thermodynamics. Now instead of gases being in different temperature start with a box in perfect equilibrium. But there's a small change - we are gonna introduce the Maxwell's Demon inside the box. He is a small creature who is the gatekeeper of the hole. And he has decided that fast moving molecules are allowed to enter one compartment but slow moving molecules are not. Slowly the Demon will filter all fast moving molecules to one side of box and slow moving molecules will be on the other side. This will increase the temperature on one side of box and reduce it on the other side, entropy of the system will decrease... poof goes 2nd law.

Coming back to holy mother of god exclamation, it struck me amidst all this that my Blog actually has a game which enables player to BE THE MAXWELL'S DEMON.

The "Separate the Green and Red" game has been rechristened "Be the Maxwell's Demon". Cause essentially it represents the system described by Maxwell and while it is not an exact representation of the system (regarding speed of molecule - here its the color), in essence it can very easily describe the concept!!

To think an exercise in rigid body simulation in java could turn out to be so similar to some totally different concept all together...!! What can i say : It really did happen to me...!!! :P

P.s. : Such real life Demons do exist. Think about Dialysis membrane, membrane proteins etc. But they are ALL pseudo demons, because the systems are not perfectly isolated and the act of separation causes entropy to increase elsewhere in the universe, most of these require energy in some form or the other.