Modeling Maxwell’s Demon
DOI: 10.1063/PT.3.2704
The interesting article “Engineering Maxwell’s demon” by Zhiyue Lu, Dibyendu Mandal, and Christopher Jarzynski in the August 2014 issue (page 60
The program lets the user zoom and rotate to inspect the device, and it plots the demon’s rotational velocity component as a function of time. The plot demonstrates the counterclockwise bias over long times that the authors describe. A user can observe the increased informational entropy in the paddle positions. A modern browser that supports the 3D graphics library WebGL and a graphics card with graphics processing units are required; click “Help” in the upper right corner for details on system requirements. Click “Edit this program” to see the code, which is short for a program of this complexity. I thank the article’s authors for helpful advice.
More about the Authors
Bruce Sherwood. (bruce_sherwood@ncsu.edu) Santa Fe, New Mexico.