by
Juan MR Parrondo(Complutense University of Madrid)
→
Europe/Stockholm
Oskar Klein Auditorium
Oskar Klein Auditorium
Description
Information can be used to extract energy from a single thermal
bath, in apparent contradiction with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
This observation was first pointed out by Maxwell in 1867 with the
introduction of his celebrated demon. Since then, the demon has
inspired much research on the relationship between information and
entropy, most of it focused on the thermodynamic cost of the
acquisition and processing of information. In the last years, new
tools for the study of the energetics of small fluctuating systems –
the so-called fluctuation theorems- have provided a better
understanding of the thermodynamics of information. In this seminar,
I will review part of the history of the Maxwell demon, with special
emphasis on these recent results, trying to give some clues to the
fundamental question: what is information?
