Neil Gershenfeld

speaker

1,202 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2023 last heard May 2023

Neil Gershenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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And when a fast molecule is coming, it opens the door.

When a slow molecule is coming, it closes the door.

After it does that for a while, one side is hot, one is cold.

When something is hot and is cold, you can make an engine.

And so you close that and you make an engine and you make energy.

So the demon is violating thermodynamics because it's never touching the molecule.

yet by just opening and closing the door, it can make arbitrary amounts of energy and power a machine.

And in thermodynamics, you can't do that.

So that's Maxwell's demon.

That problem is connected to everything we just spoke about for the last few hours.

So Leo Szilard

around early 1900s was a deep physicist who then had a lot to do with also post-war anti-nuclear things.

But he reduced Maxwell's demon to a single molecule.

So the molecule, there's only one molecule and the question is which side of the partition is it on?

That led to the idea of one bit of information.

Shannon credited Szilard's analysis of Maxwell's demon for the invention of the bit.

For many years, people tried to explain Maxwell's demon by the energy in the demon looking at the molecule

or the energy to open and close the door, and nothing ever made sense.

Finally, Rolf Landauer, one of the colleagues I mentioned at IBM, finally solved the problem.

He showed that you can explain Maxwell's demon by you need the mind of the demon.

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