Maxwell's Demon Faces Heat

Tue Mar 29 08:25:46 CDT 2016

>It is a difficult read since it is speculatively incoherent.

As a sometime science writer and sometime teacher of expository writing,
I've wrestled often with how to simplify enough but not too much, and how
to generalize enough but not too much. On both counts, Adams on science can
be really throw-the-book-across-the-room excruciating to read... all the
more so because he was so good in so many other ways, and because he had a
good nose for deep and important scientific concepts. So when he got them
wrong, he got them eloquently, memorably, deeply and importantly wrong.

A tangent -- Wikipedia reminds us of the importance of branding:

"In his letters and books [1867-1872], Maxwell described the agent opening
the door between the chambers as a 'finite being'. William Thomson (Lord
Kelvin) was the first to use the word 'demon' for Maxwell's concept, in the
journal Nature in 1874, and implied that he intended the mediating, rather
than malevolent, connotation of the word."

Would either Adams or Pynchon have become interested in "Maxwell's finite
being?" Would the idea have remained a hot topic for so long if Thomson had
written of Maxwell's "daemon" or "daimon," evoking associations with Plato
and Socrates rather than Dante and Bosch?

On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 6:00 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Historian Henry Brooks Adams
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Brooks_Adams> in his manuscript *The
> Rule of Phase Applied to History
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rule_of_Phase_Applied_to_History>* attempted
> to use Maxwell's demon as a historical metaphor
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor>, though he misunderstood and
> misapplied the original principle.[26]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon#cite_note-26> Adams
> interpreted history <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History> as a process
> moving towards "equilibrium", but he saw militaristic
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarism> nations (he felt Germany
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany> pre-eminent in this class) as
> tending to reverse this process, a Maxwell's demon of history. Adams made
> many attempts to respond to the criticism of his formulation from his
> scientific colleagues, but the work remained incomplete at Adams' death in
> 1918. It was only published posthumously.[27]
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon#cite_note-27>
>
> I have actually sorta tried to read this essay, which is in Degradation of
> the Democratic Dogma. It is a difficult read since it is speculatively
> incoherent. And wrong. (Monte could have helped him either get it right or
> give it up.). Two associative 'consequences":
> Isn't the title of the collection (of four essays, two which are readable)
> very thematically Pynchonian?...remember his words, deep theme on what
> America has become after its promise?
>
> 2) One way the brief Maxwell's Demon story strikes me In Lot 49, is as a
> compressed metaphor for the chance--necessity notion (within an entropic
> universe, of course). A--And, very akin to P's notion of life, karma,
> almost balancing out...the guy who is just under breaking
> even.....variations rung
> in Against The Day and so forth.
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 1:17 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Nice catch. There were hints of the connections between energy transfers,
>> thermodynamics, and information in Von Neumann's approach to quantum
>> theory, in Shannon. Turing and others, but as the summary notes, it was
>> Rolf Landauer in 1961 who really got traction on Maxwell's Demon. And
>> despite the stumbles Pynchon has acknowledged in "Entropy" and the Nefastis
>> machine in CoL49, his instinct that the connections mattered was sound.
>>
>> Maxwell posited that the demon ( = any mechanism) could (1) sense the
>> velocity of each gas molecule approaching its gate, and (2) open and close
>> the gate accordingly to create warmer and cooler reservoirs. He assumed,
>> knowing it for an assumption, that it could do so "for free" -- or at least
>> use less energy than you could get from the newly created temperature
>> difference between the reservoirs. Hey presto -- entropy lowered in a
>> closed system, free work (in the thermodynamic sense), perpetual motion.
>> Maxwell knew that if basic thermodynamic principles -- which he'd helped
>> formulate -- were correct, something was hinky. The Demon was his challenge
>> to his peers to figure out what.
>>
>> Nobody then or for the next century could come close to *building* such a
>> sensor or such a gate, so nearly all the discussions were "principle vs.
>> practice": OK, any real sensor would need light or other radiation to work,
>> any real physical gate would involve friction and energy loss, and maybe
>> those real numbers would always make the Demon's success impossible. But by
>> 1960 we were making or at least planning microelectronics that flipped and
>> flopped at energy scales not so far from that of single gas molecules. The
>> numbers in the discussions were getting more realistic, and they were not
>> comforting: it began to appear that an actual hardware Demon *might* yield
>> more energy than it consumed.
>>
>> The importance of Landauer 1961 (it is no accident, comrades, that he was
>> at IBM) was that he included the energy/entropy cost not only of sensing
>> and acting, but of computing... call it "processing" or "deciding" if you
>> prefer. The Demon would use additional energy for its internal housekeeping
>> -- writing and moving and erasing bits -- even if it left the gate open or
>> closed for many molecules in succession, and every time it cleared its data
>> registers to make room for a decision on the next molecule. You wouldn't
>> have thought about that before Shannon and Turing taught us the
>> relationship between "bits" of information and "bits" as physical states of
>> switches or tubes or transistors -- but once you included that, it began to
>> look like the Demon couldn't produce net energy after all.
>>
>> That's been the driving insight from 1961 up to and including this
>> experiment, and IMHO the only truly new and important element since
>> Maxwell. Behind the Demon there had always been another tacit, hidden
>> assumption: that some built-in, passive "pure logic" guided its operations.
>> But a real brain, or real computer, or real physically instantiated
>> operating system of *any* kind, is as much an energy-consuming,
>> entropy-producing "device" as the box-and-piston apparatus Nefastis shows
>> to Oedipa. Even if the Demon could sense and act for free, it can't decide
>> what to do for free.
>>
>> Which just might have something to do with Pynchon's concerns.
>>
>>
>> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=oa-2115-v2-b> Virus-free.
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>> <#m_7357523174118470746_m_-7208894711045406573_DDB4FAA8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 6:27 AM, Allan Balliett <allan.balliett at gmail.com
>> > wrote:
>>
>>> My apologies it this was shared earlier
>>>
>>> https://www.sciencenews.org/article/maxwells-demon-faces-heat
>>>
>>
>>
>
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