Abstract
In a famous thought experiment, involving ‘a being with superior faculties’, James Clerk Maxwell attempted to show that the Second law of thermodynamics only possessed statistical validity.
Maxwell’s immortal Demon proved that Victorian whimsy could relieve some of the gloom of the Germanic Heat Death.
Brush, ‘Irreversibility and Indeterminism: Fourier to Heisenberg’, Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976: 603–30)
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As Earman and Norton (1998, 1999) discuss, different scenarios can be envisaged: whether the demon is an intelligent being or a physical system does not, however, affect his ultimate failure. Cf. Szilard (1983); von Beyer (1998); Leff/Rex (2003); Maloney (2009). But see Hemmo/Shenker (2012) for a defense of Maxwell’s Demon.
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Weinert, F. (2016). Maxwell’s Demon. In: The Demons of Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31708-3_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31708-3_15
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