A Maxwell Demon engine in action beyond the Carnot/ “standard” Second law limit
Maxwell’s Demon (sometimes, “Max”) has long been a fictional device for discussing how if we have access to information we can manipulate molecular scale particles to extract work. Now, physics dot org is discussing a case:
>>Physicists have experimentally demonstrated an information engine—a device that converts information into work—with an efficiency that exceeds the conventional second law of thermodynamics. Instead, the engine’s efficiency is bounded by a recently proposed generalized second law of thermodynamics, and it is the first information engine to approach this new bound . . . . [R]ecent experimental demonstrations of information engines have raised the question of whether there is an upper bound on the efficiency with which an information engine can convert information into work. To address this question, researchers have recently derived a generalized second law of thermodynamics, which accounts for both energy and information being converted into work. However, no experimental information engine has approached the predicted bounds, until now.
The generalized second law of thermodynamics states that the work extracted from an information engine is limited by the sum of two components: the first is the free energy difference between the final and initial states (this is the sole limit placed on conventional engines by the conventional second law), and the other is the amount of available information (this part sets an upper bound on the extra work that can be extracted from information).
To achieve the maximum efficiency set by the generalized second law, the researchers in the new study designed and implemented an information engine made of a particle trapped by light at room temperature. Random thermal fluctuations cause the tiny particle to move slightly due to Brownian motion, and a photodiode tracks the particle’s changing position with a spatial accuracy of 1 nanometer. If the particle moves more than a certain distance away from its starting point in a certain direction, the light trap quickly shifts in the direction of the particle. This process repeats, so that over time the engine transports the particle in a desired direction simply by extracting work from the information it obtains from the system’s random thermal fluctuations (the free energy component here is zero, so it does not contribute to the work extracted).
One of the most important features of this system is its nearly instantaneous feedback response: the trap shifts in just a fraction of a millisecond, giving the particle no time to move further and dissipate energy. As a result, almost none of the energy gained by the shift is lost to heat, but rather nearly all of it is converted into work. By avoiding practically any information loss, the information-to-energy conversion of this process reaches approximately 98.5% of the bound set by the generalized second law. [Govind Paneru, Dong Yun Lee, Tsvi Tlusty, and Hyuk Kyu Pak. January 12, 2018. “Lossless Brownian Information Engine.” Physical Review Letters. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.020601]>>
Of course, it can be realised that to set up all of this capability to extract work from information has its own energy and entropy costs. And, in a sense, this is unsurprising, a windmill routinely extracts a high fraction of available energy up to the Betz limit, precisely because the wind is an orderly flow of fluid.
What is highly relevant is that this is an inadvertent confirmation of the relevance of information to thermodynamics and to entropy. All of this fits right in with the informational thermodynamics approach championed by Jaynes and others since. Indeed, Harry S Robertson in Statistical Thermophysics (Prentice, 1993) observed that: “the standard assertion that molecular chaos exists is nothing more than a poorly disguised admission of ignorance, or lack of detailed information about the dynamic state of a system . . . . If I am able to perceive order, I may be able to use it to extract work from the system, but if I am unaware of internal correlations, I cannot use them for macroscopic dynamical purposes. On this basis, I shall distinguish heat from work, and thermal energy from other forms . . . “ [pp. vii – viii.]
All of this then becomes highly relevant to the ID debates:
>>[T]he results may also lead to practical applications, which the researchers plan to investigate in the future.
“Both nanotechnology and living systems operate at scales where the interplay between thermal noise and information processing is significant,” Pak said. “One may think about engineered systems where information is used to control molecular processes and drive them in the right direction. One possibility is to create hybrids of biological systems and engineered ones, even in the living cell.”>>
Food for thought. END
18 Responses to A Maxwell Demon engine in action beyond the Carnot/ “standard” Second law limit
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A Maxwell Demon engine in action beyond the Carnot limit — implications for ID debates.
KF:
Very interesting. Thank you! 🙂
F/N: On waking back up I thought, h’mm, the Carnot reference may be a bit obscure so I put in “standard” second law [of thermodynamics]. Notice, this is discussing a generalisation of that law that incorporates information. Issues of info sources and propagation etc come into play. Not to mention, metrics. KF
GP, indeed. KF
The finding that ‘information is physical’ and that information has a ‘thermodynamic content’ directly falsifies the reductive materialistic, i.e. Darwinian, presupposition, that holds that information is merely ’emergent’ from a material basis.
Put simply, Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, a framework which denies the physical reality of immaterial information, are not even on the correct theoretical foundation in order to properly understand biological organisms in the first place.
Verse:
Great stuff, KF.
KF, I posted your linked reference on Facebook, to which a friend commented:
to which I replied:
As I did in post 5, I also referenced these videos for him
and this following video is also relevant to the whole ‘immaterial information is physically real’ line of evidence:
BA77, of course, if you can use information on observable state to extract work, you are in a different regime from dealing with a blackbox that has to be treated as random. KF
KF, as pointed out in this video,,,
The ‘randomness’ of biological systems is, contrary to Darwinian presuppositions, and for all practical purposes, non-existent in biological systems. This ‘lack of randomness’, which Darwinists fully expected to see but which is not there, is directly attributable to ‘quantum information’ which is constraining biological life to be so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium.
A few excerpted notes from my referenced video to that effect:
And in confirmation of Al-Khalili, and Erwin Schrodinger’s, contention that life acts like inanimate matter cooled down to near absolute zero, in the following experiment it was found that protein molecules do indeed act like inanimate matter cooled down to near absolute zero.
And the following paper also confirmed Erwin Schrödinger’s contention that life is based on quantum mechanical principles:
The video I referenced goes into more detail, but the rub is that Quantum information, which is conserved, and is not reducible to any possible material explanation (i.e. non-locality), is the physically real entity, separate from matter and energy, that is constraining the molecules of biological systems to be so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium.
@BA77
How do you explain the variety of life forms after the Noah’s Flood?
@BA77
How do you explain the variety of life forms reaching beyond billions after the Noah’s Flood?
Same say it reaches a trillion…
J-Mac, as I understand it, the number of ‘billions’ is controversial. Moreover, bacteria in any count, make up, by far, the largest percentage.
I believe that the evidence unequivocally shows, when looking at the whole geologic and/or fossil record instead of just looking at a snapshot, that diversification of species ‘within kind’, upon the earth, has been wrought by a top down process of genetic entropy and certainly has not been wrought by bottom up Darwinian processes..
Of supplemental note: Even many Darwinists admit to surprisingly rapid recovery of life forms after mass extinction events in the deep past:
Of note; I believe 5 million years is very close to what is termed the ‘geologic resolution time’ for accurately dating these ancient time periods precisely.
F/N: I am wondering if it is registering just how significant the result in the OP is, i/l/o its proposal of a particular generalisation of the second law of thermodynamics through the impact of micro-particle level observability and linked information allowing actual not just theoretically discussed work to be done. This shifts the balance towards the Jaynes et al informational approach to thermodynamics in highly significant ways, and it also is a second case of something that is inherently abstract having demonstrably significant causal effect. The first is of course the impact of numbers and more broadly the logic of structure and quantity, AKA mathematics. KF
PS1: Notice, Paneru et al:
And,
PS2: Notice, again Harry S Robertson in Statistical Thermophyiscs:
Notice, thermodynamics as has been developed pivots on ignorance of the specifics of microstate, so this raises huge questions as to what happens if info systems are able to act at molecular level, in effect converting some such entities to organised, observable entities.
Which is exactly what is happening in life.
In turn that points to, where does such information come from, and at what entropy cost elsewhere. Likewise, what is the overall cost to bring that information to bear on the target system, i.e. is there an exporting to the rest of the world. In the case above, yes, that is obvious.
Think, too, about the ways in which life systems routinely create organised concentration gradients across membranes [and semiconductor entities also, which are now down to the sort of scale of interest]. Notice, how in both cases there is a lot of drawing on energy drivers and storage, through things like ATP [thus the ATP synthase enzyme] and power supplies.
PS3: This brings us back to a point I long since clipped from Wiki for my always linked briefing note, on information and entropy:
Food for thought.
F/N2: As DV, we are going to go into some further details (and yes, there will be more of Thermodynamics and Math), let’s set some further background on Helmholtz free energy, F — NB IUPAC recommends A but F is common and familiar.
Wiki again is handy for non-controversial topics needing a quick tutorial-level reference. I will be substituting F:
This then brings up the Generalised Jarzynski expression used by Paneru et al, and as approached in their experiment to the 98.5% level. Clipping the paper reported on in the OP’s news piece:
This opens up a whole new world.
KF
BA77
I’m talking mainly about the variety of life forms that had to go to the ark.
I agree that the majority of life is bacteria, microbes etc…
Empirically I cannot directly comment on what was on the ark or on the subsequent diversity of life that followed from the animals on the ark. Nor, I believe, can anyone comment with any unquestionable empirical rigor on those questions. Though some have certainly tried:
What I can do empirically is appeal to the geologic record to substantiate the Biblical claim for a fairly recent cataclysmic worldwide flooding circa 13,000 to 14,000 years ago. I can also appeal to the first human civilization.
A few notes to that effect:
In this following video lecture (on the ‘table of nations’), at around the 6:00 minute mark, we find that the first ‘advanced’ human civilization, (with the oldest archaeological evidence of metallurgy, agriculture, wine making, etc…), flourished near, or at, the Ankara area,,,(The Ankara area is called Anatolia in the video), which is close to where Noah’s Ark is said to have come to rest on a mountaintop:
Although, because of his Young Earth Biblical view, Paul James-Griffiths did not give the dating of the area, the dating of the first ‘advanced’ human civilization, around that area, is approx. 12,000 years before the present:
J-M & BA77, pardon but this thread is on a major scientific topic and on an emerging issue. Namely, generalisation of the second law of thermodynamics to include information effects under non equilibrium circumstances. Sorry, necessarily mathematical. Could we return to and please keep focus? KF