P.S. This work was inspired in large part by one of my favorite mathematical biology papers of the 20th century, "Will a Large Complex System be Stable", published by Robert May in 1972.
www.nature.com/articles/238...
I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't read it!
Thanks to Yale's Department of Physics and Quantitative Biology Institute, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for supporting my research!
These results indicate that Maxwell demons cannot arise by chance in systems with many degrees of freedom, so we should be surprised when we find demons in the wild! This ultimately suggests that Maxwell demons can only arise through some process of selection.
The spectre of Maxwell’s demon looms all around us, with sightings reported across diverse fields from economics, to evolutionary biology, to cellular sensing, to molecular biophysics. But how surprised should we be to find demons haunting the physical world?
So how likely is it that a random complex system with N degrees of freedom will operate as a Maxwell demon? To address this I formulate null models for random dynamics with both continuous and discrete degrees of freedom, and calculate the probability p(demon|N).
A Maxwell demon is a multi-component thermodynamic system where at least one subsystem takes in heat from its environment, thus appearing in isolation to locally violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The 2nd law is recovered by accounting for information flow between subsystems.
I tackle this question in a new preprint: Will a Large Complex System be a Maxwell Demon?
arxiv.org/abs/2603.03248
📆 Join us next Tuesday, June 9 at 12 PM EST for the next klogW seminar featuring Jonas Veenstra (ENS Lyon) and Matthew Leighton (Yale University).
Don’t miss this chance to hear from two outstanding early-career researchers!
Please sign up and find more details here:
engage.aps.org/dsnp/resourc...
For a large class of models, both analytic and numerical results show that the probability of finding a Maxwell demon by chance decreases at least exponentially, and in some cases even double-exponentially, with the number N of degrees of freedom -- becoming vanishingly unlikely.
We just preprinted one of my favorite studies @FlatironInst
. I was lucky to be part of an amazing team studying the effects of rapid cooling to preserve samples in cryoEM. Read on to learn about the limits of cryoEM for biophysics and how to overcome them www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
