The Broken Engine of Szilard

Quanmin Guo

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arXiv · 1410.8565

The Broken Engine of Szilard

Quanmin Guo

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Abstract

A crucial step in the operation of the Szilard engine is the isothermal expansion of a single particle system. This expansion, seemingly a natural consequence, is unable to proceed when the piston is considered appropriately to be a thermal system subject to fluctuations in energy at a constant temperature. The Szilard engine is thus unable to complete its cycle and the effort to locate the mysterious missing entropy of turns out to be superfluous.

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Quanmin Guo. 2014-10-29. The Broken Engine of Szilard. https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8565

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