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Maxwell's demons

Maxwell's demons is the plural of Maxwell's demon.

Meaning of Maxwell's demon

Noun

Maxwell's demon (plural Maxwell's demons)

  1. A hypothetical creature in a thought experiment. Maxwell’s demon, if it existed, would act as a sort of gate guard by sorting between higher-energy molecules and lower-energy molecules within an enclosed space. Because such a sorting process would tend to decrease entropy, it would violate the second law of thermodynamics.
    • She did gather that there were two distinct kinds of this entropy. One having to do with heat-engines, the other to do with communication. The equation for one, back in the ’30's, had looked very like the equation for the other. It was a coincidence. The two fields were entirely unconnected, except...1966 March, Thomas Pynchon, chapter 5, in The Crying of Lot 49, New York, N.Y.: Bantam Books, published November 1976, →ISBN, page 77

Questions about Maxwell's demons

What is Maxwell's demons the plural of?
Maxwell's demons is the plural of Maxwell's demon.

Words near Maxwell's demons in the dictionary

  1. Maxwell bridges
  2. Maxwell Street Polish
  3. Maxwell Street Polishes
  4. Maxwell time
  5. Maxwell's demon
  6. Maxwell's demons
  7. Maxwell's otter
  8. Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution
  9. Maxwell-Boltzmann distributions
  10. Maxwell-Wien bridge
  11. Maxwell-Wien bridges

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Maxwell's demons (page history and authors); Maxwell's demon (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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