C of L49...Maxwell 's Demon: a history

malignd at aol.com malignd at aol.com
Wed Jun 3 20:53:39 CDT 2009


But it doesn't.  As has been pointed out, the Demon needs energy from without, in the form of light, to see.


-----Original Message-----
From: kelber at mindspring.com
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 5:20 pm
Subject: Re: C of L49...Maxwell 's Demon: a history








Maxwell's Demon gets around the Second Law, thwarting entropy.  Is entropy(or 
its social analog,apathy) the "magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her 
from outside and for no reason at all" that keeps Oedipa in her tower?  Then 
Tristero = Maxwell's Demon?

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>

>
>
>p. 86 hc...I won't link here to wikipedia or anything re JCMaxwell, you 
can....I just want to add the personal association of the bearded Victorian that 
he was with the bearded Smith Brothers of the famous coughdrops. (No P 
connection;  thanks for indulging me)
> 
>He was raised and remained a VERY Christian-believing scientist and was 
anti-Darwin's theory. 
> 
>Maxwell is widely acknowledged as the nineteenth century scientist whose work 
had the greatest influence on twentieth century physics. His electromagnetic 
theory and its associated field equations 'paved the way for Einstein's special 
theory of relativity, which established the equivalence of mass and energy. 
Maxwell's ideas also ushered in the other major innovation of 20th century 
physics, the quantum theory.  ----from an online bio, not wikipedia
> 
>Maxwell's Demon---wikipedia: 
>Maxwell conc
eived a thought experiment as a way to explain the statistical 
nature of the second law. He described the experiment as follows[2]:
>... if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can 
follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as 
essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. For 
we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform temperature are 
moving with velocities by no means uniform, though the mean velocity of any 
great number of them, arbitrarily selected, is almost exactly uniform. Now let 
us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a 
division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the 
individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the 
swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass 
from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of 
B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics.
> 
>Schematic figure of Maxwell's demon
>In other words, Maxwell imagines one container divided into two parts, A and B. 
Both parts are filled with the same gas at equal temperatures and placed next to 
each other. Observing the molecules on both sides, an imaginary demon guards a 
trapdoor between the two parts. When a faster-than-average molecule from A flies 
towards the trapdoor, the demon opens it, and the m
olecule will fly from A to B. 
The average speed of the molecules in B will have increased while in A they will 
have slowed down on average. Since average molecular speed corresponds to 
temperature, the temperature decreases in A and increases in B, contrary to the 
second law of thermodynamics.
>
>
>      
>




 



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