Reversing Entropy with Maxwell's Demon

Can a demon defeat the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? Get your own Space Time t­-shirt at Tweet at us! @pbsspacetime Email us! pbsspacetime [at] gmail [dot] com Comment on Reddit: Help translate our videos! Previous Episode: The Misunderstood Nature of Entropy Entropy is sometimes described as a measure of disorder or randomness. The second law of thermodynamics – the law that entropy must, on average, increase – has been interpreted as the inevitability of the decay of structure. This is … misleading. As we saw in our episode on the physics of life, structure can develop in one region even as the entropy of the universe rises. Ultimately, entropy is a measure of the availability of free energy – of energy that isn’t hopelessly mixed in thermal equilibrium. Pump energy into a small system and complexity can thrive.. Hosted by Matt O'Dowd Written Matt O'Dowd Graphics by Grayson Blackmon Assistant Editing and Sound Design by Mike Petrow Made by Kornhaber Brown (www.kornhaberbrown.com) Big Bang CoolAsCats David Nicklas Anton Lifshits Joey Redner Fabrice Eap Quasar Tambe Barsbay Mayank M. Mehrota Mars Yentur Mark Rosenthal Dean Fuqua Roman Pinchuk ColeslawPurdie Vinnie Falco Hypernova Donal Botkin Edmund Fokschaner Matthew O’Connor Eugene Lawson Barry Hatfield Martha Hunt Joseph Salomone Chuck Zegar Craig Peterson Jordan Young Ratfeast John Hofmann James Hughes Fabian Olesen Kris Fernet Jane Meyers James Flowers Greg Allen Denys Ivanov Nick Virtue Alexey Eromenko Nicholas Rose Scott Gossett Mark Vasile Patrick Murray سلطان الخليفي Alex Seto Michal-Peanut Karmi Erik Stein Kevin Warne JJ Bagnell Avi Goldfinger John Pettit Florian Stinglmayr Benoit Pagé-Guitard Nathan Leniz Brandon Labonte David Crane Greg Weiss Shannan Catalano Brandon Cook