Equation 1 · From Origins to Frontier: A History of Stochastic Thermodynamics and Complex Systems
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Szilard reduced Maxwell’s population of molecules to the simplest case that still carried the paradox: a single gas particle in a box. An external agent measures which half of the box the particle occupies, inserts a partition, and lets the particle push a piston on the side it occupies, converting the result of that one-bit measurement into extractable work. Szilard showed that the demon’s ability to extract work was tied exactly to the amount of information it acquired in the measurement — one bit of information corresponds to a definite quantity of work, T 2 , where is Boltzmann’s constant and T is the bath temperature. This is worth stating as an equation because it is the…
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Szilard reduced Maxwell’s population of molecules to the simplest case that still carried the paradox: a single gas particle in a box. An external agent measures which half of the box the particle occupies, inserts a partition, and lets the particle push a piston on the side it occupies, converting the result of that one-bit measurement into extractable work. Szilard showed that the demon’s ability to extract work was tied exactly to the amount of information it acquired in the measurement — one bit of information corresponds to a definite quantity of work, T 2 , where is Boltzmann’s constant and T is the bath temperature. This is worth stating as an equation because it is the single quantity that recurs across the rest of this history:
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