REVIEWS

Rolf Landauer
How molecules defy the demon
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Hans Christian von Baeyer
1998 Random House 256pp $25.OOhb
It was in 1867, in a letter to his friend and
colleague Peter Tait, that James Clerk
Maxwell first stated his renowned "demon
paradox". He imagined a vessel with two
compartments, separated by a controllable
door, with a demon that allowed hot mole-
cules to accumulate on one side, and cold
molecules on the other. The resulting tem-
perature difference could then be used to
drive a thermal engine. Thus, the demon
could convert die thermal energy of mole-
cules at equilibrium into useful work and
violate the second law of thermodynamics.
It is remarkable testimony to Maxwell's
insight that this question - raised at a time
when molecules were still a conceptual
crutch and poorly characterized - took us
over a century to resolve. Only within recent
years have we been able to show that it is
impossible to sort molecules without ex-
pending more energy than the work that
can be extracted from the sorted molecules.
The second law of thermodynamics does
indeed hold true.
In this book, Hans Christian von Baeyer
reviews the history of that clarification, and
uses it as a basis for recounting much of the
content and history of thermodynamics and
statistical mechanics. It is a superb account,
exhibiting the expository skills .the author
demonstrated in earlier books and revealing
his sound understanding of the subject.
Above all, the book shows a deep sense of
the rhythms and structure of science. It is
aimed at a broad readership, as the absence
of equations makes dear. The author also
omits figures, although this at times requires
considerable verbal baggage, for example,
when he describes the shapes of graphs. The
book's final chapter, on recent work related
to motion produced by fluctuations, suffers
particularly in this respect.
Nevertheless, in contrast to many other
science books sold at airport bookstalls for
casual reading, this one promises less and
delivers more. It has about 250 slim pages,
and the general reader actually has some
chance of finishing it. Moreover, unlike
many of its competitors, the book does
not promise to solve the deep mysteries
of nature, such as the origin of life or the
meaning of free will.
However, the desirable brevity comes at
some cost. You will not, for example, find
new historical scholarship. In fact, the au-
thor acknowledges his debt to an authoritat-
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Mischievous beast - Maxwell's demon frustrated scientists for years befort d he could not exist
ive earlier volume, Maxwell's Demon: Entropy,
Information, Computing^ S LefF and A F Rex
(ed) Adam Hilger 1990), which is an anno-
tated collection of reprints. The brevity of
von Baeyer's book also means that while
there is a great deal about entropy - with
Boltzmann a central figure -Josiah Willard
Gibbs never appears.
Boltzmann supplied us with the micro-
scopic understanding of entropy through
his famous equation S
=
k\ogW, which
appears on his tombstone, although it never
actually appears in this book, except in a
cumbersome verbal form. (That equation
was made immemorial for me when I was a
teaching assistant and found an exam script
where the student had written "S k log W,
where k is Klotzmann's constant".) Boltz-
mann's insight was elaborated by Gibbs into
the more detailed set of tools that most of us
who work in this subject have to use.
The history of thermodynamics in the
early 19th century is a welcome reminder
that the relative date of scientific develop-
ments does not always map neatly into our
perception of relative difficulty. The steps
toward understanding the first and second
laws were interwoven in time. Yet, today, the
law of conservation of energy is folklore.
Entropy, except for meaningless cocktail-
party patter, is a subject for specialized col-
lege courses, and even there it is not really
understood by many of us until we reach
statistical mechanics.
The modern resolution of the demon
paradox is based on the fact that to sort
molecules, we (or the demon) need to make
measurements on them. Von Baeyer gives
Brillouin credit for first treating the recorded
results of measurements as part of the total
physical system viewed in the entropy bal-
ance. Actually Leo Szilard had already
taken that pioneering step. Brillouin, who
made several major contributions to physics,
unfortunately only added confusion to our
understanding of the demon. Enlarging on
Szilard's early work, we eventually learned
that the critical energy dissipation, which
saves die second law, occurs when the
recorded measurement information is
erased and the memory is reset for its next
(or first) use. This contrasts with our earlier
view that energy is expended only when
information is transferred from the mole-
cule to the register that controls the shutter
or other sorting device.
In the two concluding chapters von
Baeyer makes contact with the forefront of
recent research, and this is the weakest part
of what is otherwise an excellent book. In
die first of these two chapters we meet
"algorithmic entropy" and its relationship to
real physical entropy. Algoridimic entropy is
die minimum number of bits needed to
specify a number or structure. According to
diis view, a periodic array of molecules is
easily described, but random placement
requires us to give the position of every
molecule. However, in a book diat empha-
sizes history I was surprised diat we do not
learn diat it was Charles Bennett, my col-
league at IBM, who made die first step in
connecting physical entropy to earlier, more
mathematical notions about die definition
of randomness. While Boltzmann and
Gibbs taught us diat entropy characterizes
Pl IIICI WOILD JANIMRV 1999
37
REVIEWS
ensembles, not a particular molecular con-
figuration, Bennett told us that, in fact,
entropy can be assigned to each particular
configuration, and then can be averaged
over the ensemble.
The last chapter deals with recent work
on "thermal ratchets" - systems in which
particles are in time-dependent and spatially
periodic force fields and also subject to
noise. Neither the force field nor the noise
exert a net force, but the particles can be
moved by the interaction of the two. Again
the account is blemished by singling out one
name, Dean Astumian, in a field that has a
very complex history. Thermal ratchets are
supposedly found in biological systems, but
that case is far from proven.
These last two chapters illustrate the
whims of fashion. The fact that entropy is
not just a property of an ensemble is a deep
insight, and one that came only after many
decades of supposedly deep analyses of
entropy. However, this point has attracted
surprisingly little attention among practi-
tioners of statistical mechanics. In contrast,
thermal ratchets have become a busy little
industry, the depth and significance of
which may be transitory.
In fact, labels may have a great deal to do
with the level of attention given to topics. If
Maxwell's demon had been called Max-
well's sorting device, would this book have
ever been written?
is atl BM' sThomasJ Watson
Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, US
Werner Ebeling and Miguel Jimenez-Montano
Complexity simplified for beginners
Foundations of Complex-System Theories:
In Economics, Evolutionary Biology and
Statistical Physics
Sunnv Auvdnsi
1998 Cambridge University Press 416pp
50. 00/ $64. 95hb
Complex behaviour can occur in any system
made up of large numbers of interacting
constituents - be they atoms in a solid, cells in
a living organism or consumers in a national
economy. Much of the work in this new field
of "complexity" was pioneered in the early
1970s by mathematicians and physicists
like Philip Anderson, Mitchell Feigenbaum,
Peter Grassberger and Hermann Haken, as
well as many researchers connected to the
Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.
Research into complex-system theories
has been growing rapidly since then, and
many original investigations have been pub-
lished in recent years. The vast literature
means that almost everyone in the field feels
the urgent need for orientation, conclusions
and surveys. Books about complex systems
have therefore become somewhat fashion-
able, and this one by Sunny Auyang, a
former member of the National Magnet
Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in the US, presents the field in a
non-technical manner for the general reader.
Her approach is to present and compare
the key ideas from studies of complexity
in physics, biology and economics, taking
them as raw material for philosophical
analysis. The author stresses the importance
of drawing analogies between sciences,
although she points out that analogies are
instructive "not because they pattern the
strange in terms of the familiar, but because
they prompt us to discern in the familiar
case general ideas that are also applicable to
unfamiliar situations". For example, she says
that comparing the perfectly competitive
market theory of microeconomics with the
self-consistent field theory in physics "does
not explain consumers in terms of electrons
and vice-versa", but it does enable complex
systems of interacting constituents to be
Computational complexity - self-organized spirals in a cyclic cellular automaton model
approximately represented by "a more
tractable system of non-interacting con-
stituents with modified properties respond-
ing independently to a common situation
jointly created by all".
The book is comprehensive and interest-
ing to read. The author has collected a lot
of useful information under the guiding
principle that all sciences share much in
common. She quite rightly expresses her
dissatisfaction with "neo-classical econom-
ics" - the idea that the economy is in equilib-
rium and that people only trade when prices
have reached the levels they hoped for. As
she says, neo-classical models are "powerful
and fruitful [but] are not adequate for the
description of many intricate phenomena in
modern economics". In particular, she criti-
cizes the assumption that all individuals act
in the same way; in reality, of course, house-
holds and businesses operate differently, and
that diversity is the driving force of the econ-
omy. The assumption of homogeneity also
means that an economy cannot show
"emergent behaviour" - a term that denotes
any system that is impossible to describe
simply by summing the properties of its
component parts.
However, Auyang is evidently an outsider
in the field of complexity. For example, she
does not mention "evolutionary economics"
- a new approach to economics that bor-
rows from the evolutionary aspects of bio-
logy. And the work of people like Richard
Nelson, Sydney Winter and Gerald Silver-
berg is, apparently, unknown to the author,
although she does quote a non-technical
paper by Brian Arthur (Scientific American
February 1990 p921). Her treatment of
technological evolution is also incomplete,
to say the least. When it comes to molecular
evolution she presents the long-standing
controversy between the relative roles of
mutation and random drift in a conven-
tional way, ignoring modern results that
show the two approaches complement,
rather than contradict, each other.
The author's main topic of analysis is
many-body theories, although she leaves
aside organic and cybernetic systems. Along
with linguistics, we feel that these are some
of the most interesting complex systems.
There is, for example, only a cursory men-
tion of algorithmic information theory, and
the pioneering work of Andrei Kolmogorov
and Ray Solomonoff is not mentioned.
An article by Gregory Chaitin on random-
ness and mathematical proof is referenced
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PHYIICI WOILD I