Abstract
The paradox of Maxwell’s demon was proposed in a letter from James C. Maxwell to Peter G. Tait for the first time. In the letter, Maxwell mentioned his gedankenexperiment of “a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule” [1]. The being may be like a tiny fairy, and may violate the second law of thermodynamics. In 1874, William Thomson, who is also well-known as Lord Kelvin, gave it an impressive but opprobrious name—“demon.” Later, Leo Szilard proposed an important model of the demon, which quantitatively connects the thermodynamic work to information [2]. Since then, numerous researchers have been discussed the foundation of the second law of thermodynamics in terms of Maxwell’s demon [3–16]. In this chapter, we review the historical arguments and the basic ideas related to the problem of the demon. The modern aspects of the demon [5, 6, 17–25] will be discussed in the following chapters.
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Sagawa, T. (2012). Review of Maxwell’s Demon. In: Thermodynamics of Information Processing in Small Systems. Springer Theses. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54168-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54168-4_2
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