Maxwell's Demon: Why Warmth Disperses and Time Passes - Hardcover

Von Baeyer, Hans Christian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679433422 ISBN 13: 9780679433422

Publisher: Random House, 1999

Synopsis

You arrive at your office and unpack your breakfast from the local deli. The piping-hot coffee and chilly orange juice you purchased just minutes ago are now both disappointingly lukewarm. Why can't the coffee "steal" heat from the juice to stay hot? Why does even the most state-of-the-art car operate at a mere 30 percent efficiency--and why can't Detroit ever better the odds, no matter what space age materials we invent? Why can't some genius make a perpetual motion machine? The answers lie in the field of thermodynamics, the study of heat, which turns out to be the key to an astonishing number of scientific puzzles.
        If you want to know what's happening in the physical world, you've got to follow the heat. In Maxwell's Demon: Why Warmth Disperses and Time Passes, physics professor Hans Christian von Baeyer tells the story of heat through the lives of the scientists who discovered it, most notably James Clerk Maxwell, whose demonic invention has bedeviled generations of physics students with its light-fingered attempts to flout the laws of thermodynamics. An intelligent, submicroscopic gremlin who could sort atoms as they
flew at him, Maxwell's Demon would effectively make an impossible task--forcing heat to flow backward--possible. Explaining why the Demon can't have his day has been an intellectual gauntlet taken up by a century and a half of the world's most brilliant scientists, whose discoveries Professor von Baeyer vividly etches.
        The centuries-old discipline of thermodynamics informs today's most cutting-edge research in chaos, complexity, and the grand unified theory of everything--physics' Holy Grail. Even more amazing, the study of heat turns out to explain something seemingly unrelated--time, and why it can run in only one direction.
        With his trademark elegant prose, eye for lively detail, and gift for lucid explanation, Professor von Baeyer turns the contemplation of a cooling teacup into a beguiling portrait of the birth of a science with relevance to almost every aspect of our lives. Readers will find themselves rooting for Maxwell's ever-mischievous Demon even as they come to appreciate that he is doomed to failure.

About this title

About the Author

Hans Christian von Baeyer is professor of physics at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he  lives with his wife and two daughters. He is the recipient of the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Magazine Award. His previous books include The Fermi Solution: Essays on Science; Taming the Atom: The Emergence of the Visible Microworld; and Rainbows, Snowflakes, and Quarks: Physics and the World Around Us.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Hans Christian von Baeyer's Previous Books


Taming the Atom:

"No one has told the amazing history of atomism more accurately or more entertainingly. . . . It's a great book."--Martin Gardner, author of The Ambidextrous Universe

"Thoroughly intelligent and thoughtful. This remarkable book succeeds in being both scientifically challenging and humanly charming."--The Boston Sunday Globe

"Lucid and entertaining."--The New York Times Book Review


The Fermi Solution:

"With uncommon literary grace, von Baeyer draws the reader beyond the literal meaning of computation, experiment, and formula to discover the mysterious beauty of science, to find poetry in reason."--Committee of the National Magazine Award

"Hans Christian von Baeyer writes as vividly of sweeping ideas as of yesterday's conversation."        --Philip Morrison, Scientific American


Rainbows, Snowflakes, and Quarks:

"This little book could be a classic."--The American Journal of Physics

From the Inside Flap

t your office and unpack your breakfast from the local deli. The piping-hot coffee and chilly orange juice you purchased just minutes ago are now both disappointingly lukewarm. Why can't the coffee "steal" heat from the juice to stay hot? Why does even the most state-of-the-art car operate at a mere 30 percent efficiency--and why can't Detroit ever better the odds, no matter what space age materials we invent? Why can't some genius make a perpetual motion machine? The answers lie in the field of thermodynamics, the study of heat, which turns out to be the key to an astonishing number of scientific puzzles.<br> If you want to know what's happening in the physical world, you've got to follow the heat. In Maxwell's Demon: Why Warmth Disperses and Time Passes, physics professor Hans Christian von Baeyer tells the story of heat through the lives of the scientists who discovered it, most notably James Clerk Maxwell, whose demonic invention has bede

Reviews

Simple questions, von Baeyer points out, often lead to profound insights. "What is warmth?" is one such question, and the efforts of many curious people to answer it have built the science of thermodynamics. Those efforts comprise von Baeyer's story. He describes felicitously and lucidly the laws of thermodynamics, entropy, the dissipation of energy and time's arrow, providing along the way little-known details about the lives of the famous and not so famous pioneers of the field: Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford), Sadi Carnot, Robert Mayer, James Joule, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Clausius, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann. Their work moves von Baeyer to put in his own words a concept stated by physicist Gerald Holton: "A few simple themes--unspoken assumptions and intuitively held prejudices that originate outside science--underlie all scientific thought."

Von Baeyer (Physics/Coll. of William and Mary) offers assorted views of the demon and how hes been slain over time to preserve the sacred second law of thermodynamics. The second law asserts that the universe is moving toward disorder and an increase in entropy. Given enough time, the universe will achieve a state of thermal equilibrium that has been poetically described as heat death. Practically speaking, the second law says that your cup of coffee always cools, that you can't go backward in time, and that there is no free lunch as far as energy is concerned. That's where Maxwell's demon comes in. The eminent James Clerk Maxwell devised a thought experiment in which a tiny (and clever) demon sat at a trap door between two chambers, each filled with gas at different temperatures. Within each chamber, the molecules moved at various speeds in random directions. Suppose the microscopic demon selected the fastest molecules from the cooler chamber and opened the door to admit them to the warmer chamber, never allowing molecules from the hotter chamber to gain access to the cooler? The hotter chamber gets even hotter, with little or no energy expended--a violation of the second law! But, it turns out, this and other variants on the ways a demon could sort molecules didnt allow for Brownian motion, in which a ``large'' object (the trap door) bombarded by molecules starts jiggling and destroying the purposeful activities of the demon. To properly appreciate the cogency of that argument, von Baeyers reader is treated to a detailed survey of 19th- and 20th-century physics: The conservation of energy, the concept of atoms, probability theory, and much more. To his credit, von Baeyer, a National Magazine Award winner, is ever a graceful and witty writer, at pains to clarify concepts. But this is challenging stuff. Readers are advised to follow Feynman's principle: Read until you don't understand, then go back and reread. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Von Baeyer, a physicist at the College of William and Mary, invites the reader to travel with the illuminati of thermodynamics along their zig-zag path to an understanding of heat, energy and entropy. This improbable journey leads readers through a cannon factory, a brewery and a ship anchored off Jakarta. Although he does a fine job of describing the science, he also introduces readers to the inner worlds and belief systems of those who created the conceptual latticework of thermodynamics. By pointing up the follies and misconceptions of even the most revered masters of science (such as Lord Kelvin's stubborn rejection of evolution), Von Baeyer allows the nonscientific reader to realize the extent to which scientific ideas come about as successive approximations to truth. Von Baeyer's title invokes his sometime traveling companion, a puckish sprite created by James Clerk Maxwell. The function of Maxwell's demon is to reverse the natural order of thingsAto make heat flow from cold to hot, to increase the degree of order in a systemAall without expending energy. But he could also be a metaphor for the emotional cost of imagination, the "dark side" of science, the imaginative obsession that led to the madness of Robert Mayer and the suicide of Ludwig Boltzmann. Von Baeyer's writing style is so compelling that it would induce even the most scientifically naive reader to care about the laws of thermodynamics.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A hot cup of coffee will cool down over time, but most people probably don't understand the laws of thermodynamics that make this happen. Von Baeyer uses common sense and familiar observations as a tool for exploring deep scientific principles.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Why do warm things always cool? Because of the second law of thermodynamics, stating that heat disperses or, if you will, that entropy increases. Increasing entropy, by the way, is statistically expressed as increasing probability, which is to say increasing event randomness. Meanwhile, thanks to Einstein, we know that cooling is really conversion of energy to mass. All these expressions, it turns out, are equivalent to saying that time goes by. And we learned all this because of the creature of von Baeyer's title, invented by physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831^-79) to test the second law by defying it. That creature, that demon, keeps a gate between two gas-filled boxes, one warmer than the other; flouting the second law, he sends warm molecules from the cooler box into the warmer but prevents warm molecules from the warmer from entering the cooler. Several brilliant minds have advanced science by squelching the demon and reasserting the second law. Their stories and those of the earlier discoverers and formulators of the laws of thermodynamics make riveting reading. Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679433422
• ISBN 13: 9780679433422
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 207