Monte Carlo was the realization, through digital computing, of what Maxwell could only imagine: a way to actually follow the behavior of a physical system at its elemental levels, as “if our faculties and instruments were so sharpened that we could detect and lay hold of each molecule and trace it through all its course.”71 The Teller-Ulam invention invoked a form of Maxwell’s demon to heat a compartment to a temperature hotter than the sun by letting a burst of radiation in, and then, for an equilibrium-defying instant, not letting radiation out. Ulam’s self-reproducing cellular
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