In 1867, physicist James Clerk Maxwell did something very naughty.
He proposed an apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics so diabolically clever that other physicists have been trying to resolve it ever since.
His thought experiment invoked a 'demon' – a tiny, intelligent being stationed at a door between two chambers filled with gas, only allowing fast particles into one side and slow particles into the other – with the end result being warmth in one chamber and chill in the other.
The problem is that this decreases entropy – something that, according to the second law of thermodynamics, cannot happen in an isolated system without a compensating increase elsewhere.
Yet Maxwell's demon apparently achieves this without doing any work. It is the poster child for indolence.
Now, a new team of physicists has exacerbated the problem.
By exploiting information hidden in a physical system's memory, researchers have shown that the malingering imp can extract more energy than a memoryless system would ever give up.
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