Nobel Laureate to Discuss Maxwell’s Demon

Photo Submitted

Dudley R. Herschbach

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Nobel Laureate Dudley Herschbach will offer this year’s Maurer Lecture in Physics on “Outdoing Maxwell’s Demon: Taming Molecular Wildness” at 4 p.m. Friday, April 6, in the Donald W. Reynolds Center at the University of Arkansas. His talk will be telecast from Harvard University. A reception will begin at 3:30 p.m. in the lobby. The Maurer Lecture is sponsored by the physics department in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

Herschbach, who received his doctorate in chemical physics from Harvard in 1958, was a member of the chemistry faculty at the University of California, Berkeley from 1959 until 1963, when he returned to Harvard, where he has been Baird Professor of Science since 1976. He won the Nobel Prize for creating something like a “Maxwell's demon” in the laboratory by using molecular beams to probe the dynamics of chemical reactions in single collisions, an approach that had long been deemed impossible.

Maxwell's demon is an imaginary creature that mathematician and physicist James Clerk Maxwell proposed in a thought experiment. He posited a box filled with gas in which the temperature determines the speed of the molecules. An imaginary demon controls the flow of molecules to create more useful energy than originally existed. As a result, the demon decreases entropy while increasing the amount of available energy, thereby defying the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy can be decreased at one place as long as it is balanced by as big an increase somewhere else.

Herschbach currently studies methods for creating collisions of molecules, slowing and trapping cold molecules to examine instances when molecules interact as waves rather than particles. He is particularly interested in pre-college science education and is engaged in several efforts to improve K-12 science education and public understanding of science.

The Maurer Lecture Series is named in honor of University of Arkansas alumnus Robert D. Maurer, who received a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Arkansas in 1948. As co-inventor of fiber optic cable, Maurer has made dramatic and far-reaching contributions to improving technology and communications around the world.