Hacker News Reader

That the term originates with Maxwell's Daemon, which is fundamentally an entropy-reducing agent, is rather apropos - would that all our daemons performed so well.

View on HN

I'd be interested in the quantum mechanics explanation of how the daemon reduces entropy. When I discussed the thought experiment with some friends we simply concluded that the very act of sorting the molecules is introducing outside energy into the system allowing local entropy to be reduced, just like any other machine. The total entropy of the universe would stay the same and the laws of thermodynamics are still intact.

Even more interesting the outside energy also includes information, as it is needed to figure out which are the slow and the fast molecules.

But in the end it is a bogus idea (even as a thought experiment) since quantum mechanics comes into play in real life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com