![]() Maxwell had created a system that appeared to defy the rise of entropy, and thus the laws of the universe. This isolated system would seem to grow more orderly, not less, because two distinguishable compartments have more order than two identical compartments. #TWO IDENTICAL TINY BALLS OF HIGHLY COMPRESSED FULL#And every time a slow-moving particle approached from the right, the demon let it into the left-hand compartment.Īfter a while, the left-hand compartment would be full of slow, cold particles, and the right-hand compartment would grow hot. Every time it saw a fast-moving particle approaching from the left-hand side, it opened the door and let it into the right-hand compartment. What if, suggested Maxwell, a tiny imaginary creature - a demon, as it was later called - sat at the door. But at any given time, some particles will be moving more slowly than others. The average speed of the particles corresponds to the temperature of the gas - faster is hotter. Like all gases, this one is made of individual particles. In the thought experiment, Maxwell imagined splitting a room full of gas into two compartments by erecting a wall with a small door. And even after a solution was found, physicists have continued to use “Maxwell’s demon” to push the laws of the universe to their limits. A thought experiment devised by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1867 stumped scientists for 115 years. So of course physicists are constantly trying to break it. Seen in this way, the inexorable rise in entropy, or disorder, as quantified by the second law of thermodynamics, takes on an almost mathematical certainty. If the universe chooses from all the possible states at random, you can bet that it’s going to end up with one of the vast set of disordered possibilities. But there are uncountable billions of permutations where the molecules spread out in different ways throughout the water. There’s another where, say, the molecules settle in a tidy clump at the pool’s bottom. There’s one possible state where the molecules are crowded into the thimble. Physicists quantify this tendency to spread by counting the number of possible ways the dye molecules can be arranged. All of those dye molecules are going to slowly spread throughout the water. Imagine, for example, dropping a thimbleful of red dye into a swimming pool. ![]()
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