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Pramana

Entropy, information and Maxwell’s demon after quantum mechanics

Rajendra Bhandari

Published Mar 1, 1976• 2 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.1007/bf02847122

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Maxwell’s demon emanates from a thought experiment proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867 to illustrate the statistical nature of the second law of thermodynamics. Subsequently researchers wondered whether such a demon could in fact violate the second law. Leon Brillouin argued that the entropy produced during the demon’s measurement precluded such a violation. Years later Oliver Penrose and Charles Bennett observed (independently) that a Maxwell’s demon gathers information and stores it in a memory. Penrose showed that erasure of such a memory sends sufficient entropy to the environment to preclude violation of the second law. Notably this is so even when measurement produces arbitrarily little entropy. Bennett obtained the same result using Rolf Landauer’s seminal research on the thermodynamics of computation. The stunning shift in focus from measurement to erasure provided the impetus to better understand the role of information in quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. Indeed the linkage of information with physics is the principal legacy of Maxwell’s demon. Szilard’s one‐particle classical “gas” model and its quantum mechanical extension, together with postulated connections between entropy and algorithmic information, have provided useful insights. We review the long history of Maxwell’s demon and assess the current status of the second law in the context of the demon’s operations.
Several subjects which reside in the overlap area of quantum mechanics, statistical physics and thermodynamics are investigated in depth. This collection of subjects shares a common domain which is referred to as Maxwell’s demon. The classical version of this idea is introduced, and then, the contribution made by Szilard to the subject is presented. Several demons are considered, and it is shown that to best understand this area, quantum mechanics and the role information plays in it must be appreciated deeply.