Thermodynamics with Continuous Information Flow

guest post by Blake S. Pollard

Over a century ago James Clerk Maxwell created a thought experiment that has helped shape our understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the law that says entropy can never decrease.

Maxwell’s proposed experiment was simple. Suppose you had a box filled with an ideal gas at equilibrium at some temperature. You stick in an insulating partition, splitting the box into two halves. These two halves are isolated from one another except for one important cavea...