~ Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment
created by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell
in 1867 in which he suggested how the second
law of thermodynamics might hypothetically
be violated. (Wikipedia)
Imagine a demon guarding a trapdoor
between two cells, which it opens
as soon a fast-moving molecule
approaches. After some time, this being
succeeds in capturing all the fast ones
in cell B and the slow ones in cell A;
their grouping is meant to demonstrate
the nature of a pure state, which doesn't
actually exist in this model, since
the demon will have expended energy in quickly
opening and closing that door: fifty times?
sixty? a hundred? Though the temperature
in one cell might have cooled and the other's
become hot as a sauna, he'll also have
worked up a sweat by then; rolled up
his sleeves, unzipped his vest. Maybe
he's ticked off at not getting that job
promotion, at causing his wife to leave
because of his obsessive tracking of her
every move. In other words, the nature
of time's arrow points from order
to disorder; and the present
has moved from the past to a future
that's famously difficult to control.
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) is Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for her manuscript Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press in fall 2020. She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.