Japanese physicists have managed to increase the internal energy of a system by using only the information about it and without giving it additional energy, the journal Nature Physics has reported.
The process of turning information into energy was first explained in theory by a British physicist James Maxwell, who described a door between two rooms is guarded by the imaginary being called “Maxwell demon.”
The demon opens the door to hotter molecules and closes it in front of cooler ones. As a result, the hotter and cooler molecules go to different rooms and the difference in temperatures can be put to practical use.
This task demands much energy and scientists have never considered the idea seriously. Today, however, advances in nanotechnology mean there is increasing interest in such systems.
