Overlooked Work and Heat of Intervention and the Fate of Information Principles of Szilard and Landauer

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that any intervention disrupting a system's equilibrium necessitates work and heat, reaffirming the first law and negating second law violations, with implications for information principles and Maxwell's demon.

Contribution

It reveals that interventions destroying equilibrium always require work and heat, challenging previous assumptions in information thermodynamics and clarifying the role of entropy.

Findings

Interventions in equilibrium systems require work and heat.

No violation of the second law occurs during such interventions.

Information entropy is unnecessary for explaining these thermodynamic processes.

Abstract

We show that any external intervention (insertion or removal of a partition) that destroys the equilibrium or brings it in a system always requires work and heat to ensure that the first law is obeyed, a fact that has been completely overlooked in the literature. As a consequence, there is no second law violation. We discuss the ramifications of our finding for information principles of Szilard and Landauer and show that no information entropy is needed. The relevance of this result for Maxwell's demon is also considered.