Basil Mahon Quote
Leo Szilard, in 1929, showed that the very act of acquiring information about a system increases its entropy in proportion to the amount of information gathered. As the entropy increases, less of the system's total heat energy is available for doing work. To gather enough information to work the shutter effectively we would have to use up, or render inaccessible, an amount of energy at least equal to the work output of any machine that we could drive from the system. So we will never be clever enough to create perpetual motion. Through the work of Szilard and others, Maxwell's demon helped to spark the creation of information theory, now an essential part of the theoretical basis of communications and computing.
Basil Mahon
Leo Szilard, in 1929, showed that the very act of acquiring information about a system increases its entropy in proportion to the amount of information gathered. As the entropy increases, less of the system's total heat energy is available for doing work. To gather enough information to work the shutter effectively we would have to use up, or render inaccessible, an amount of energy at least equal to the work output of any machine that we could drive from the system. So we will never be clever enough to create perpetual motion. Through the work of Szilard and others, Maxwell's demon helped to spark the creation of information theory, now an essential part of the theoretical basis of communications and computing.