This article argues that most of the approaches to the foundations of statistical mechanics have severed their link with the original foundational project, the project of demonstrating how real mechanical systems can behave thermodynamically.

In this second part of our two-part paper we review and analyse attempts since 1950 to use information theoretic notions to exorcise Maxwell’s Demon. We argue through a simple dilemma that these attempted exorcisms are ineffective, whether they follow Szilard in seeking a compensating entropy cost in information acquisition or Landauer in seeking that cost in memory erasure. In so far as the Demon is a thermodynamic system already governed by the Second Law, no further supposition about information and entropy (...) is needed to save the Second Law. In so far as the Demon fails to be such a system, no supposition about the entropy cost of information acquisition and processing can save the Second Law from the Demon. (shrink)

In this first part of a two-part paper, we describe efforts in the early decades of this century to restrict the extent of violations of the Second Law of thermodynamics that were brought to light by the rise of the kinetic theory and the identification of fluctuation phenomena. We show how these efforts mutated into Szilard’s proposal that Maxwell’s Demon is exorcised by proper attention to the entropy costs associated with the Demon’s memory and information acquisition. In the second part (...) we will argue that the information theoretic exorcisms of the Demon provide largely illusory benefits. According to the case, they either return a presupposition that can be had without information theoretic consideration or they postulate a broader connection between information and entropy than can be sustained. (shrink)