Did You Know?
What is Maxwell's demon?
An image of Maxwell's demon extracting energy from the thermal motion of particles in Escher's Waterfall.
In the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics, Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment created by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell to "show that the Second Law of Thermodynamics has only a statistical certainty". It demonstrates Maxwell's point by hypothetically describing how to violate the Second Law: a container of gas molecules at equilibrium, is divided into two parts by an insulated wall, with a door that can be opened and closed by what came to be called "Maxwell's demon".
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