Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Maxell's
demon
(Thompson 1874)
Maxwell's “being”
Maxwell's
angel
or
molecular machine
(This topic 2012)
Fig. 11.38 The duality of Maxwell's “being.” Maxwell's demon cannot exist because it violates
the second law of thermodynamics, but Maxwell's angels exist because they do not violate the
second law and act as molecular machines in all living systems
carry out his assigned task without violating the second law if he acts as or is a
molecular machine, the concept well established in the molecular biology of the
twentieth century (Alberts 1998). Thus, it seems logical to distinguish two kinds of
Maxwell's beings - the original one that violates the second law, i.e., Maxwell's
demon, and the other that obeys the second law, which I suggest here to be referred
to as “Maxwell's angel” (see Fig.
11.38
).
Maxwell's demon is of particular interest to us because it acts as the focal point
of interaction between information (I) and energy (E), the two fundamental entities
underlying the operation of all molecular machines. Therefore, in order to under-
stand the I-E relation, it may be helpful to understand howMaxwell's demon works
or does not work. According to Proposition I of the “dualogy” of Sabah Karam
(2011), “In order to describe any single event, action, state of being, thought, or any
other real or abstract concept it is necessary to identify two distinct complementary
co-dependent entities that define the state (conjugate variables) and behavior
(conjugate transformations) of the phenomenon under consideration.” If Karam is
right, the reason for the century-long debates about Maxwell's demon and the
associated I-E relation (Leff and Rex 1962) may be traced to the failure on the
part of the debaters “to identify two distinct complementary co-dependent entities”
that define Maxwell's “being”. In this topic, I am suggesting that the “two distinct
complementary co-dependent entities” that characterize Maxwell's “being” are
Maxwell's demon
, named by William Thompson in 1874, and
Maxwell's angel
that was born on December 1, 2011, during one of my lectures on the information-
energy complementarity given to a group of interdisciplinary honors seminar
students at Rutgers. Since
Maxwell's demon
and
Maxwell's angel
are conjugate
entities, understanding one will inevitably lead to understanding the other, again
according to the dualogy of Karam (2011). By identifying Maxwell's angel with the
molecular machine of the twentieth-century molecular biology (Alberts 1998), it is
claimed here that we will understand Maxwell's angel and its conjugate, Maxwell's
demon, and hence the I-E relation if and when we understand how molecular
machines work, the Holy Grail of the twenty-first-century molecular biology.
Just as Maxwell himself succeeded in integrating
electricity
and
magnetism
into
electromagnetism
in the mid-nineteenth century, Maxwell's angles (or molecular
machines) may contribute to integrating
information
and
energy
into
information-
energy
(also called
gnergy
; see Sect. 2.3.2) in the twenty-first century. Figure
11.39
represents these ideas diagrammatically. In formulating these diagrams, two ideas
emerged unexpectedly: (1) There may exists triadic categories composed of three
