Maxwell's Demon - Information is power...

[kandrathe]

For the scientific minded among us, who are also big Diablo fans.... An article in the Economist ("Applied Demonology"), that discusses some experiments showing that information can be converted into energy.

I've seen it done with different colored lasers shifting the orbitals of electrons in special crystal materials, but this is a different take. In that case, energy could be stored, creating information, and later destroyed releasing the information.

In Naturenews the article is "Demonic device converts information to energy".

The team's set-up was inspired by a nineteenth-century thought experiment proposed by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, which — controversially, at the time — suggested that information could be converted into energy. In the thought experiment, a demon guards a door between two rooms, each filled with gas molecules. The demon allows only fast-moving gas particles to pass out of the room on the left and into the room on the right, and only slow-moving particles to pass in the opposite direction.

...

Vlatko Vedral, a quantum physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, says that it will be interesting to see whether the technique can be used to drive nanomotors and artificial molecular machines. "I would also be excited to see whether something like this is already at work in nature," he says. "After all, you could say that all living systems are 'Maxwell's demons', trying to defy the tendency for order to turn back into randomness."

Coolest profession of the year 2020... Nanomechanical engineer.