Maxwell's demon (19th of February 2012)

I spent year 2007 in Ljubljana in the Institute Jožef Stefan on the Department for Theoretical Physics (F1). I was a post-doc there on a stipend awarded to me by the Croatian Foundation for Science. The project I proposed and for which I got the funds was called Biological nanostructures and it reflected my interest for researching nanoscience in the biological context which I started in year 2006. in the paper A. Šiber, "Buckling transition in icosahedral shells subjected to volume conservation constraint and pressure: Relations to virus maturation", Phys. Rev. E 73, 061915 (2006).

There is a lively activity in biophysics in Ljubljana. It overlaps with nanoscience so it was an ideal surrounding for me. There I worked with Rudi Podgornik with whom I still work, but I spent most time (hanging around and having good time, but also talking about science) with Primož Ziherl. I never published a scientific paper with Primož (we did publish >> a comic together), but I do hope that it may happen this year. I was not isolated in Ljubljana. On the contrary, I felt even more included in the scientific community there than here in Zagreb, but it is possible that it is an impression of a dutiless outsider. For example, there I met a small group of people who are behind the project called >> KVARKADABRA, "the journal for explaining science". That is how the story of this post begins.

Namely, the Kvarkadabrians persuaded me to make something for their web page, some game or a computer animation which would illustrate some scientific concept with the aim of popularizing science. I opted for an upgrade of a flash game that I made earlier for my then active project Nanoatlas. That is how the game that you can see in the window above was mode. If everything is right, the window should look as shown in the screenshot below:

If you cannot see the scene illustrated above, try upgrading your flash player, and if even that does not work, it is possible that the SWF file is already "obsolete". I can see it and play it in Firefox and IE9 running under Windows 7, so I hope that it will work for you also.

The game is a "simulation" of Maxwell's demon. First, pick the difficulty level. I propose that you click with the mouse in the white little square next to začetnik, which in Slovenian means beginner. After that, click with your mouse anywhere in the window and the game should begin.

The aim of the game is to separate blue from red balls by "engaging" the demon i.e. by clicking on the red button in the upper right corner of the "container" of the "gas atoms" (balls). "Demon" in the shape of yours truly then opens the wall separating the two compartments and lets atoms go from one side of the container to the other. If you cleverly and timely click so to separate the atoms, you will see a rewarding ending screen, totally in the retro style of C64 games that I used to play and lose time on them as a kid. The voice of the demon was recorded by Jure Zupan, a particle physicist from Jožef Stefan institute and one of the founders of Kvarkadabra (he speaks Slovenian much better than I do).

If all of that is too quick for your reflexes, lower the temperature of the gas by clicking on the left yellow arrow. This will slow the atoms, in agreement with the equipartition theorem which says that there is a kT/2 of energy in each degree of freedom of the particle.

Once you see an ending screen of the game, you may want to play it again, perhaps on a more difficult level. In that case, click on the button below the game window which says Play again.

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Last updated on 19th of February 2012.