Demon Box

She obeyed without a word, just as she had hours earlier when he’d bid her stay with him instead of leaving with the Omaha Public Defender who had brought her. The doctor toweled a hand dry on a pant’s leg, then reached into the pocket. He removed a ballpoint pen and his checkbook. Grunting, he scooted along the slippery staves until he was near the brightest candle.

“About one hundred years ago there lived a British physicist named James Clerk Maxwell. Entropy fascinated him also. As a physicist he had great affection for the wonders of our physical universe, and it seemed to him too cruel that all the moving things of our world, all the marvelous, spinning, humming, ticking, breathing things, should be doomed to run down and die. Was there no remedy to this unfair fate? The problem gnawed at him and, in British bulldog fashion, he gnawed back. At length he felt he had devised a solution, a loophole around one of the bleakest laws on the books. What he did was… he devised this.”

Carefully cradling the checkbook near the flame so all could see, he began to draw on the back of a check, a simple rectangular box. “Professor Maxwell postulated, ‘Imagine we have a box, sealed, full of the usual assortment of molecules careening about in the dark… and inside this box a dividing partition, and in this partition a door’ “

At the bottom of the partition he outlined a door with tiny hinges and doorknob.

“ ‘And standing beside this door… a demon!’ “ He sketched a crude stick figure with a tiny stick arm reaching for the doorknob.

“ ‘Now further imagine,’ said our Professor, ‘that this demon is trained to open and close this door for those flying molecules. When he sees a hot molecule approaching he lets it pass through to this side’ “—he drew a large block H on the right half of the box—“ ‘and when he sees a cold, slow-moving molecule our obedient demon closes the door, containing it on this, the cold side of the box.’ “

Mesmerized, we watched the puckered hand draw the C.

“ ‘Should not it then follow,’ Professor Maxwell reasoned, ‘that as the left side of the box got colder the right side would begin to get hot? Hot enough to boil steam and turn a turbine? A very small turbine, to be certain, but theoretically capable of generating energy none the less, free, and from within a closed system? Thus actually circumventing the second law of thermodynamics would it not?’ “

Dobbs had to admit that it seemed to him like it ought to work; he said he had encountered such demons as looked like they had the muscle to manage it.

“Ah, precisely—the muscle. So. Within a few decades another fascinated physicist published another essay, which argued that even granted that such a system could be made, and that the demon-slave could be compelled to perform the system’s task without salary, the little imp still would not be without expense! He would need muscles to move the door, and sustenance to give those muscles strength. In short, he would need food.

“Another few decades pass. Another pessimist theorizes that the demon would also have to have light, to be able to see the molecules. Further energy outlay to be subtracted from the profit. The twentieth century brings theorists that are more pessimistic still. They insist that Maxwell’s little dybbuk will not only require food and light but some amount of education as well, to enable him to evaluate which molecules are fast-moving and hot enough, which are too slow and cool. Mr. Demon must enroll in special courses, they maintain. This means tuition, transportation to class, textbooks, perhaps eyeglasses. More expense. It adds up…

“The upshot? After a century of theoretical analysis, the world of physics reached a very distressing conclusion: that Maxwell’s little mechanism will not only consume more energy than it produces and cost more than it can ever make, it will continue to do so in increase! Does this remind you of anything, children?”

“It reminds me,” my brother Buddy said, “of the atomic power plants they’re building up in Washington.”

“Just so, yah, only worse. Now. Imagine again, please, that this box”—he bent again over the picture with his ballpoint, changing the H into a G—“represents the cognitive process of Modern civilization. Eh? And that this side, let’s say, represents ‘Good.’ This other side, ‘bad.’ “

He changed the C to an ornate B, then waggled the picture at us through the steam.