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 Lor...

Jonathan Schaffer (2010) has summoned a new sort of demon – which he calls the debasing demon – that apparently threatens all of our purported knowledge. We show that any debasing skeptical argument must attack the justification condition and can do so only if a plausible thesis about justification is false. Jonathan Schaffer (2010) has summoned a new sort of demon – what he calls the debasing ...

Maxwell’s Demon is at the heart of interrelation between quantum information processing and thermodynamics. In this thought experiment, a demon extracts work from two thermal baths equilibrium by gaining about them single-particle level applying classical feed-forward operations. talk I will show how to implement photonic version with active in fiber-based system using ultrafast optical switche...

We present an experimental realization of an autonomous Maxwell's demon, which extracts microscopic information from a system and reduces its entropy by applying feedback. It is based on two capacitively coupled single-electron devices, both integrated on the same electronic circuit. This setup allows a detailed analysis of the thermodynamics of both the demon and the system as well as their mu...

In the present paper, several issues concerning the second law of thermodynamics, Maxwell’s demon and Landauer’s principle are dealt with. I argue that if the demon and the system on which it operates without dissipation of external energy are made of atoms and molecules (gas, liquid or solid) in thermal equilibrium (whose behaviour is described by a canonical distribution), then the unavoidabl...

Maxwell’s demon was born in 1867 and still thrives in modern physics. He plays important roles in clarifying the connections between two theories: thermodynamics and information. Here the history of the demon and a variety of interesting consequences of the second law of thermodynamics are presented, mainly in quantum mechanics, but also in the theory of gravity. Also highlighted are some of th...

In his famous letter in 1870, Maxwell describes how Joule's law can be violated "only by the intelligent action of a mere guiding agent", later coined as Maxwell's demon by Lord Kelvin. In this letter we study thermodynamics of information using an experimentally feasible Maxwell's demon setup based a single electron transistor capacitively coupled to a single electron box, where both the syste...

on the shelves of any evolutionary biologist or student of the subject and you are likely to see a textbook by Mark Ridley. But Ridley, formerly at Emory University in Atlanta, and now in Oxford, has had another book in his mind for quite some time. He believes there are some ideas sparked by the Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel, that are of broader interest and has set out to explore some of them ...