- In the thought experiment, Maxwell imagined splitting a room full of gas into two compartments by erecting a wall with a small door. Like all gases, this one is made of individual particles. The average speed of the particles corresponds to the temperature of the gas — faster is hotter. But at any given time, some particles will be moving more slowly than others.
- What if, suggested Maxwell, a tiny imaginary creature — a demon, as it was later called — sat at the door. Every time it saw a fast-moving particle approaching from the left-hand side, it opened the door and let it into the right-hand compartment. And every time a slow-moving particle approached from the right, the demon let it into the left-hand compartment.
- After a while, the left-hand compartment would be full of slow, cold particles, and the right-hand compartment would grow hot. This isolated system would seem to grow more orderly, not less, because two distinguishable compartments have more order than two identical compartments. Maxwell had created a system that appeared to defy the rise of entropy, and thus the laws of the universe.
- The demon is just a placeholder for some conceptual mechanism that could discretely measure and block or pass particles based on their speed/temperature. What this article states is that we have determined that it’s theoretically impossible to construct such a mechanism - the process of measurement itself requires more energy and generates more entropy than the resultant increase in order from its operation -though perhaps you could build one that’s still a good bit more efficient than existing engines.