SARAH D. REITH

Maxwell meets the gases

Several physicists have presented calculations that show that the second law of thermodynamics will not actually be violated, if a more complete analysis is made of the whole system including the demon… For example, if the demon is checking molecular positions using a flashlight, the flashlight battery is a low-entropy device, a chemical reaction waiting to happen.

The demon here is not Ravana of the ten handsome heads, he who earned the right to dine on saints by meditating in the flame of pure thought, by throwing one fine head each thousand years into the fire of his mind. Maxwell is a mini-demon. He’s a short-short not an epic, a humble thought experiment, a doorman devil, in-or decreasing entropy by monitoring speed of molecules--depending on whether such activity qualifies as work or relaxation; also on whether the demon makes use of labor-saving implements like renewable batteries powered perhaps by long mindful breaths.

The second law of thermodynamics forbids (through statistical improbability) that two bodies of equal temperature, when brought into contact with each other and isolated from the rest of the Universe, will evolve to a stable state in which one of the two has a significantly higher temperature than the other.

Maxwell’s little spirit knows the letter of the law; is a stubborn segregationist, all things being equal, separate, and suspended in the universe in constant animation. The devil is a follower of custom over creed, never heated, never working, a demonic automated response system that knows exactly where each moving thing belongs, down the level of molecular sighs.

Since the demon and the gas are interacting, we must consider the total entropy of the gas and the demon combined.

What was that about a chemical reaction waiting to happen? Never fall in love with your love or your work! The demon falls in love with swirling gases and the devil looks adoringly at form as beauty saunters slowly through the passage in between the isolated chambers A and B beneath the gaze of a being whose powers are as finite as our own.

The Learned Professor Speaks Mostly on Faust

The angels, for instance, speak in the genus sublime.

Cosmology                   Novalis             The Harmony of Spheres

Grotesquerie

If you know your geography                 The Egyptians

The confusion of uproar            ordered Nature

Illusions of grandeur and allusions to the French

let them eat cake

and periwigs

and walrus tusks

and oysters with their neatly combed-out hair.

Clearly, Goethe has borrowed from Schiller Die Horen.

How do you spell that?

Mephisto          obviously

stands in stark contrast to this frame I just tried to explain.

Tuesday Music

We heard them all in order of the months of some obscure year that they appeared:

Only records made on Tuesdays in 1923.

And then a girl began to sing

And Bessie Smith went silent

In respect for living blood.

There were tears tattooed into the corners of her eyes

She had an air about her, not of weeping

But of paper roses, trailing vines.

Ciao, bella! Ciao, bella! Ciao! Ciao! Ciao!

She turned her shapeless face into the shadows of the trees.

She pulled a set of thimbles from a silk string bag

They rattled like counterfeit coins.

And then she scratched them down a washboard

Crying Love me

In an old-time blues chanteuse’s voice

Like water flowing over pebbles in her mouth.

Dream a little dream of me; moaning and yearning

Fingering a bell beneath the rolling washboard slats.

Under the sycamore tree; stretching it out,

Like a long slow arching of a supple yearning back.

And then she was just a girl with a washboard

Running thimbles down its spine.

Trains passed on the tracks below,

Rattling the warehouse where apple trees grow out of the floor

And a trapdoor leads into a dungeon

Barely big enough to hold one drunken sailor.

Just a pudding-faced girl

Privy to the deepest mysteries of life,

Like all the rest of us.

And still

We danced to that old Tuesday music

Lustily and well.