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For the first meter , scientists have convert data into thoroughgoing energy , experimentally verify a thought experiment first proposed 150 years ago .
The idea was originally formulated by physicist James Clerk Maxwell , but it gained controversy because it appeared to break the second police force ofthermodynamics . Put in observational terms , this law state that when hot and stale urine are mixed , they will eventually reach an equilibrium middle temperature .
An image of Maxwell’s demon extracting energy from the thermal motion of particles in Escher’s Waterfall - an artistic paradox in which water flows up a waterfall, instead of down.
Maxwell aim that a conjectural being ( after dubbed Maxwell ’s daemon ) could separate the piddle into two compartment and override the cognitive process , isolate raging molecules from cold by permit only the hotter - than - norm through a trap - door between the compartment .
Because mixed water is consider more unhinge ( i.e. of high selective information ) than detached water , the devil has convert a system from a state of disorder to a state of order of magnitude , using only information ( the knowledge of which molecules were hot and cold ) .
That seemed to violate the law , which also states that entropy should not decrease in an isolated arrangement . In other Word , the daimon should not have been capable to separate the hot and cold-blooded water system without expending energy .
by and by Magyar physicist Leó Szilárd proposed that the process does not transgress the law of physics , because the demon would in fact have had to expend some vitality to ascertain which molecules are hot and cold .
put it into activity
While scientists have uphold to debate the hypothesis , never before has anyone put the experiment into natural action . late , physicist Shoichi Toyabe of Chuo University in Japan and colleagues did just that .
" Nowadays we have the technology , even individual particle can be observed and we can control very small elements very quickly , so in principle it ’s not difficult to make a kind of Maxwell ’s demon , " say study joint author Masaki Sano of the University of Tokyo .
The researchers set up a very miniature reading of a volute stairway and caused a molecule to climb up this staircase using entropy .
In the setup , the staircase was really made of potential energy and created using electric fields . The molecule had some thermal energy – heat – so it would fluctuate , act in random directions .
The scientist used a eminent - amphetamine camera to photograph the molecule . When it happened to be act up the stairway , they let it move freely , but when it happened to be moving down the stairway , the investigator block its movement by insert a virtual wall using an electric field of force .
" It ’s like the particle is wee-wee random steps up or down , but only when the particle goes up the stairs , we put some wall on the stairs to keep off the particle fall down , " Sano told LiveScience . " This is kind of a Maxwell ’s demon . "
As the particle moved up the stairway , it realise vim because it locomote to a location of higher electric potential – akin to climb up a mountain . Yet the researchers never had to push the particle up the mountain ( i.e. do body of work or input Energy Department ) – they merely used the information about which commission it happened to be moving in at any given time to guide the climb .
Energy boost
Not only were the research worker able to move the particle up the steps , but they were able to precisely measure how much free energy was change over from entropy .
The researchers describe their results in the Nov. 14 online edition of the diary Nature Physics .
In an accompanying essay in the same issue of the diary , physicist Christian Van den Broeck of the University of Hasselt in Belgium , who was not involved in the new study , called it " a direct substantiation of information - to - energy spiritual rebirth . "
While the experiment itself does show that it ’s possible to create energy out of information , in praxis , the technique does n’t extend potential for solving the get-up-and-go crisis any time shortly .
" The true energetic cost of this data - to - DOE conversion experimentation lies jolly hide out in its huge peripheral setup ( including the doctoral student who is operating the experiment ) , " Van den Broeck wrote . " As such , the experimentation is reminiscent of produce a lilliputian shot of energy from atomic fusion in a reactor that is consuming considerably more energy . "
