Popular lectures and addresses / by William Thomson.

  • William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Date:
1889-
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Popular lectures and addresses / by William Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    155/486 page 137
    THE SORTING DEMON OF MAXWELL. ^Abstract of a Friday evening Lecture before the Royal Institution of Great Britain, February 28, 1879 (Proc. R. I. vol. ix. p. 113).] THE word- demon, which originally in Greek meant a supernatural being, has never been properly used as signifying a real or ideal per- sonification of malignity. Clerk Maxwell's demon is a creature of imagination having certain perfectly well defined powers of action, purely mechanical in their character, invented to help us to understand the Dissipation of Energy in nature. He is a being with no preternatural qualities, and differs from real living animals only in extreme smallness and agility. He can at
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