![\"John_Bechhoefer](\"http:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/science\/files\/2016\/04\/John_Bechhoefer-SFU-193x300.jpg\")
Please join us in welcoming John Bechhoefer from the Simon Fraser University. As part of the 2016 Canadian Association of Physicists Lecture Tour he’ll be visiting UFV!<\/p>\nPlease join us in welcoming John Bechhoefer from the Simon Fraser University. As part of the 2016 Canadian Association of Physicists Lecture Tour he’ll be visiting UFV!<\/p>\n
When:<\/strong> Monday, April 4, 2016 @ 2:30 PM Abstract<\/strong>: Short bio<\/strong>: Please join us in welcoming John Bechhoefer from the Simon Fraser University. As part of the 2016 Canadian Association of Physicists Lecture Tour he’ll be visiting UFV! When: Monday, April 4, 2016 @ 2:30 PM Where: Room A353 Abstract: In 1867, at the dawn of statistical physics, Maxwell imagined a thought experiment that has both … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":150,"featured_media":2408,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,21,58,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-deans-office","category-events","category-news","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/150"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3047"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3050,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3047\/revisions\/3050"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ufv.ca\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nWhere<\/strong>: Room A353<\/p>\n
\nIn 1867, at the dawn of statistical physics, Maxwell imagined a thought experiment that has both troubled and inspired physicists ever since.\u00a0 Traditional thermodynamics separates the observable macroscopic motions associated with work from the unobservable degrees of freedom associated with heat.\u00a0 But imagine\u2014as can now be done experimentally on small systems where fluctuations are important\u2014that you can observe some of these hidden degrees of freedom.\u00a0 Maxwell needed a \u201cdemon\u201d to do this; now we can build it in the laboratory.\u00a0 The demon (experimenter) can then use the acquired information to lower entropy, extracting work from a surrounding heat bath.\u00a0 But what of the second law of thermodynamics?\u00a0 Can using information to extract work from a heat bath lead to perpetual motion machines?\u00a0 In 1961, Rolf Landauer proposed what is now seen as the solution to this threat to the Second Law:\u00a0 erasing the information acquired by the demon requires work, enough to compensate for any extracted from a heat bath.\u00a0 Only recently has this minimum work to erase information been measured.\u00a0 I will tell you how we did this, how it resolves the issues Maxwell first raised, and how this and other results are leading to a new view of thermodynamics where information is one resource among many that can be exploited to control the behaviour of microscopic systems.<\/p>\n
\nJohn Bechhoefer has worked in the fields of experimental statistical physics, biophysics, soft condensed matter, and pattern formation.\u00a0 He received his PhD from the University of Chicago, did postdoctoral work at the Univ. de Paris Sud (Orsay) and the Ecole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure de Lyon, and is now Professor of Physics at\u00a0 Simon Fraser University and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.\u00a0 His current research is at the intersection of information theory, control theory, and statistical physics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"