Maxwell's Demon - Information is power...

[ZatarRufus]

... thought experiment proposed by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell ...

$#@&!

I'm not, no, I'm not taking the links. That could (enjoyably) distract me for way too long.

Based on what you posted here (and I as I recall), Maxwell's demon itself required no energy input and the thought experiment was clarifying an aspect of the behaviour of matter by illustrating the opposite of what would transpire if the demon where not directing traffic. With the demon, the collection of the high-energy molecules on the one side and the slow motion ones on the tother causes the temperature to rise in one chamber whilst it decreases in the other. Obviously this could be used to represent binary ones and zeroes.

I believe the point at the time was that the demon still could not violate the 2nd law because it would require some sort of radiation different than what is in the rest of the system in order to see the molecules and the energy level of whatever light source was used would exceed the entrophy lost by the sorting.