By Andrew Grant
Anyone trying to circumvent the physical laws governing heat is going to get burned.
A new experiment reveals how a device that robs a closed system of heat to make it more orderly, an action forbidden by a bedrock law of physics, inevitably pays a price by becoming hotter and more disordered. It’s a real-life demonstration of a nearly 150-year-old thought experiment known as Maxwell’s demon. If this demon really could skirt the second law of thermodynamics — which states that the entropy, or disorder, of an isolated system can never decrease — then it would be possible to create a perpetual motion machine.