A fresh, entertaining inquiry into the nature of energy, time, and the physical world, by esteemed science essayist Hans Christian von Baeyer.If you want to know what's going on in politics, you follow the money. If you want to know about physical processes, you follow the heat. Its study, thermodynamics, turns out to be the key to just about every scientific puzzle you can think of. Why can't anyone make a more efficient engine, no matter what new methods we may discover? Why does time only fly in one direction? And what does this centuries-old science have to say about chaos, chance, complexity, and the unified theory of everything?

Maxwell's Demon tells the story of heat through the lives of the scientists who discovered it, most notably James Clerk Maxwell, whose "demon" was thought up to test the strictures of heat and energy. An intelligent, submicroscopic gremlin who could sort atoms as they flew at him, Maxwell's Demon would effectively make an impossible task -- forcing heat to flow backward -- possible. Von Baeyer here vividly relates the laws of nature to today's most cutting-edge research.

(From Goodreads)