Schmokelberg's Door Bitch
Maxwell says "no"
Maxwell's Demon is no match for Schmokelberg's Door Bitch
The "establishment" view of how Maxwell's Demon works goes like this. A box is divided into two chambers by a wall with a tiny door that the demon opens and closes to admit fast particles in one direction and slow ones in the other direction.
This "sorts" the gas into hot and cold collections so the system's total entropy is decreased.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't like this. It holds that entropy in a closed system must increase over time.
The official excuse for this apparent violation is that the demon's ability to sort molecules requires information processing, and the act of acquiring and erasing information has an entropic cost and the total entropy of the combined system (gas + demon) still increases, thus upholding the Second Law.
I never liked this explanation perhaps because I never saw the mathematics behind the claim. I find the idea a bit hard to swallow, unlike the amazing Succubus - Schmokelberg's Door Bitch who can swallow anything.
Suck you what!?
More of a guideline than a rule
When I heard of Maxwell’s Demon back in 1969, I immediately thought “how the hell could they calculate that?”. At that time though, the explanation we were given was that the calculation showed that the energy required to open and close the door was more than any gain resulting from the segregation of fast and slow particles. I wasn’t buying that bullshit.
No mention was made of information processing and storage. However my objection doesn’t go away with this more accurate formulation. The speed and mass of the particles have no effect on the detection and decision making, provided your detection system is up to it. Just as (as I had thought at the time) they have no effect on the energy needed to open and close a door. I thought “show me the calculations and I’ll give an example with heavier, faster particles where the strategy would work”. Of course being fresh out of high school in a lecture theatre with 500 other students, I was reluctant to raise this point with the lecturer who was a bit of an arsehole anyway. He’d banned note taking and instead offered to sell us lecture notes. I transferred out of the A strand at the end of Lent term and started Trinity in the B strand. By Michaelmas I knew I’d made the right decision.
When I told my uncle, the legendary Quimbo Schmokelberg, of my objection, he claimed Maxwell’s Demon was obviously a total wuss. He proposed instead, a Succubus with attitude that later became known as “Schmokelberg’s Door Bitch” after the affectionate name for nightclub promoters/bouncers. In this strategy one door was open. But whenever a particle approached from the “outside” (the cold side), the Succubus closed it. The detection system was tuned so that fast moving particles could still slip through before the Succubus could close the door. There was a separate door that was closed and the Succubus opened it when a particle was detected approaching from the “inside” (the hot side). Similar detection tuning ensured that the fast moving particles encountered the door when it was still closed, and so they were reflected. Slow moving particles arrived after the door had opened and so they were let out.
In this way the particles, by their very behaviour, sort themselves and the opening/closing mechanisms (our Succubus) on the two doors can be automatically triggered by the detection system. No decision making required.
Uncle Quimbo claimed that he had another solution involving a “coat check lobby” where he claimed fast particles were denied exit because, in their haste, they had failed to pick up their hat-check ticket on the way in. But this solution was overcomplicated, in his opinion.
