Maxwell's Demon Exorcised?

Heh, sorry. Couldn't help with the pun.

It appears that there's now experimental evidence that erasing information requires the expenditure of energy. Consequently, this energy defeats the scenario presented in the Maxwell's Demon.

The results safeguard one of the most cherished principles of physical science: the second law of thermodynamics. This law states that heat will always move from hot to cold, or equivalently, that entropy — the amount of disorder in the Universe — always increases.

In the nineteenth century, the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell proposed a scenario that seemed to violate this law. In a gas, hot molecules move faster than cold ones. Maxwell imagined a microscopic intelligent being, later dubbed a 'demon', that would open and shut a trapdoor between two compartments to selectively trap hot molecules in one of them and cool ones in the other, defying the tendency for heat to spread out and entropy to increase.

Landauer’s theory offered the first compelling reason why Maxwell’s demon couldn’t do its job. The demon would need to erase (‘forget’) the information it used to select the molecules after each operation, and this would release heat and increase entropy, more than counterbalancing the entropy lost by the demon.

It is very difficult to go against the 3rd Law, I tell ya!

Zz.