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b69907a
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"We all behave like Maxwell's demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as "superintelligent," but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe."
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maxwell
entropy
information
organization
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James Gleick |
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99c278e
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"In despair, I offer your readers their choice of the following definitions of entropy. My authorities are such books and journals as I have by me at the moment. (a) Entropy is that portion of the intrinsic energy of a system which cannot be converted into work by even a perfect heat engine.--Clausius. (b) Entropy is that portion of the intrinsic energy which can be converted into work by a perfect engine.--Maxwell, following Tait. (c) Entropy is that portion of the intrinsic energy which is not converted into work by our imperfect engines.--Swinburne. (d) Entropy (in a volume of gas) is that which remains constant when heat neither enters nor leaves the gas.--W. Robinson. (e) Entropy may be called the 'thermal weight', temperature being called the 'thermal height.'--Ibid. (f) Entropy is one of the factors of heat, temperature being the other.--Engineering.
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science
peter-guthrie-tait
peter-tait
tait
robinson
maxwell
james-clerk-maxwell
james-maxwell
rudolf-clausius
rudolf-julius-emanuel-clausius
entropy
definition
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Sydney Herbert Evershed |
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dff2063
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Let a drop of wine fall into a glass of water; whatever be the law that governs the internal movement of the liquid, we will soon see it tint itself uniformly pink and from that moment on, however we may agitate the vessel, it appears that the wine and water can separate no more. All this, and have explained, but the one who saw it in the cleanest way, in a book that is too little read because it is difficult to read, is , in his Principles of Statistical Mechanics.
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science
maxwell
gibbs
j-willard-gibbs
james-clerk-maxwell
james-maxwell
josiah-gibbs
josiah-w-gibbs
josiah-willard-gibbs
ludwig-boltzmann
ludwig-e-boltzmann
ludwig-eduard-boltzmann
willard-gibbs
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Henri Poincaré |