30 Comments

Maxwell let an actual Demon into the box? So that's who murdered Schrodinger's Cat!

Mystery solved!

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I remember that twist. There was Halloween candy in the box. Right? Right? Please tell me it was Halloween candy. I might've repressed it for some reason.

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I watched that scene in the theater like 10 times, and not because I loved the movie (although I did really enjoy it), but because I worked in a movie theater that served beer, and this paired very well with beer.

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"Peckish? Try SeveredHeadz™! SeveredHeadz™ pairs well with beer, wine, and non-alcoholic beverages. SeveredHeadz™ - the only snack you'll ever need that fits in a single box. SeveredHeadz™!"

(Hyper-fast disclaimer voice: "Side effects include anxiety, stress, experiencing the seven deadly sins, and in extreme cases decapitation.")

Try SeveredHeadz™ today!

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*editor's note: don't actually cut heads off and put them into boxes

**second ed's n: man I am so sorry about all these spoilers. a head ends up in a box, what are you gonna do?

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Measuring and sorting involves judgement, which may be another term for dualism. As long as we approach the issue from this perspective, we have an unsolvable, perhaps…

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Dualism in the sense of having a distinct you and a distinct "not you", right?

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To me it is any system that makes measurements leading to a distinction…

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Probably my favourite natural philosopher.

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Maxwell's Demon, unlike most demons, is not evil and has a specific function.

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Hey now, don't some pretedemons have a specific function? I'm just thinking about the ones who are supposed to torment one person.

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I offer a somewhat shallow observation. My first thought was the little demon is like a heat pump. As an electrical engineer I think of loss often as heat losses. So why would an electric resistive heater not be as energy efficient as a heat pump? That kind of puzzled me for a while. But the heat pump is just moving heat that already exists from one point to another. It can do that more efficiently than generating the heat directly like an electric heater does. It takes advantage of the physics of evaporation and condensation to shuffle heat where we want it. And even with lossy motors moving parts and such it still can get the job done more efficiently than just resistive heat. That's still fascinates me.

And not to throw in a comment that will be controversial, but I've always found some of the most persuasive arguments for creation and against evolution are rooted in that 2nd law about entropy. It takes information to create order out of disorder. Where did it originate? Its an argument that compelled me to seek a creator.

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Bobby, I actually don't think your heat pump observation is trivial at all! It's the idea that heat can be moved around in a more efficient way than generating new heat - but even still, that costs a certain amount of energy (due to information content).

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If a system can get to an equilibrium state, there the entropy will be at its maximum. If a system is not at an equilibrium (eg energy is flowing into it or something else is destabilizing it) then the entropy is relatively low other configurations or even periodic fluctuations may occur.

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I've been posting on the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution: https://peterzhickman.substack.com/p/darrigols-boltzmann-seven

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That is a wonderful article. Well done!

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Thanks, Steve! I like to open doors so people can think more deeply. This is definitely one of those gateway pieces.

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That's awesome, Peter! Would Darrigol be good for anyone curious about the 2nd law and wanting to take it further? I think I really just introduced the topic today.

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There’s two Darrigols I would recommend right away: the reprint of from C-numbers to q-Numbers…where Darrigol learned to write English in 1992. It’s really about Bohr, but covers Planck.

Then there’s Atoms, Mechanics, and Probability which goes over about 60 of Boltzmann’s memoirs on molecular thermodynamics. It skips the 1884 stuff on the electromagnetic field and I’m detouring on that starting in Darrigol’s Boltzmann Eight which will go all the way back to Dulong and Petit in 1819 or even slightly earlier. I was trained as an archaeologist so posting on science tends to pull me far back in time. Also I’m not good at math so the original experimental results tend to mean more to me than the lastest formulations.

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I love looking back at the original experiments and the way modern physics has been derived from there. It's so much fun!

I'm glad you've got some rec's for deep dives! This is what I'm here for: to get folks curious, and then if they want to dive deeper, there's a great source right here.

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Excellent! I agree you need to understand the full growth of concepts not just the sanitised and abbreviated versions they become.

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What’s really odd is how you rarely find a paper by a working scientist that uses the Planckian combinatorial entropy. The plain, vanilla statistico-mechanical entropy works very well even in simulations BUT you rarely find a non-scientist who hasn’t somehow decided the Planckian combinatorial entropy is adequate. I guess it is adquate — but also kind of misleading especially about the arrow of time. Which is kind of paradoxical since supposedly the combinatorial entropy fixes that for the very people who can’t get over the fact that time almost certainly doesn’t need an arrow at all. Now I have confused myself verbally at least.

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I could be wrong and often am I am just left with the feeling that the full potential of matrices has not been fully realised as they are only used where simpler models are not available because they are hard to deal with. Insights that might arise from struggling with that formalism might have delivered more? I know that wave mechanics was shown to provide equivalence and yet …

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I could be even more wrong, but if I ever got the now quasi-defunct blog all the way back to 1926 (I'm now back in about 1810), we may find that the Heisenburg (diagonal) energy matrix was too restrictive and Dirac's more generalized set of possible transformations (along with the Schroedinger eq as a special case) was able to deal with relativistic situations in strange and unexpected (though quite real...ie seemingly very unlikely aspects of the actual universe) situations well into the 1930s as the detectable energies in particle interactions began to climb into the cosmic ray spectrum. Possibly anyway.

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Yes. Dirac was a formidable theoretician. I am fond of him too.

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:).I find it a little disappointing that physicists don’t recognise their bias to simplification. Heisenbergs matrix mechanics was considered too abstract ( difficult to visualise) but beautifully encapsulated position and momentum in one mathematical object. Schrödingers wave mechanics came along six months later and everyone heaved a big sigh of relief and used that because it was simpler. Now matrices are cropping up in AI and associative networks modelling consciousness. Can’t help wondering how far we might have got if we stuck with Heisenberg’s formalisation

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Hmmm...well, no the matrices never go away, but there is that odd period from the late 1920s to the late 1940s where none of the formalisms seem adequate to match the phenomena. By 1950 the rules for the formalisms are codified but the phenomena go on elaborating. Theory catches up by the early 1970s. I was going to take the blog into the phenomenological wilderness of the 1930s, but I had to stop and work out what was up with Dirac when successive waves of weirdness happened in the 1930s. His theory elucidated some of the weirdness but there are some very weird mesons out there that could not be adequately characterized until the Standard Models of the 1975-1995 period worked out. At the moment I'm going back to around 1810 so who knows when I'll get to work on Dirac in 1926. Not any time soon.

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