Spaceship Engineer - 0.99 USD
by Captain Robert Cox, Version: 1.0 , 385 KB
Package name: com.maxwellsdemon.droidjava , Last Update: 2012-02-27 22:03:11
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What's new in this version (1.0):
This is a simple "Maxwell's Demon" type of game.
James Clerk Maxwell was a brilliant Scottish physicist and mathematician. His 4 equations of electromagnetism sum up everything we know about the electromagnetic force, allowing us to explain electricity, magnetism, and electromagnetic radiation.
In any given volume, some particles are moving faster than others, and the temperature of that volume is really only the AVERAGE of each particle's kinetic energy. Things are hot if they have a lot of fast moving (high energy) particles. And things are cold if they have a lot of slow moving (low energy) particles.
In 1871, Maxwell asked the following question:
Imagine you have a box which is partitioned down the middle. The box is filled with air at room temperature. (Of course, some air molecules are moving faster than others.) If you could train a microscopic demon to open and close the partition, in such a way as to separate the fast moving air molecules on one side of the box, and the slow moving molecules on the other side, then your box would have a hot side and a cold side. Now, with the difference in temperature, you can run a heat engine as the heat is allowed to flow from hot to cold. (Or, the demon could only allow molecules to pass in one direction, creating a vacuum on one side of the box, and high pressure on the other, which could be use to drive a piston.)
Maxwell knew this could NEVER happen. It would be a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and is therefore just as impossible as a perpetual motion machine.
In this game, you are an engineer on a spaceship working in the Entropy Potential Reclamation Division. As the ship's Bussard scoops capture elementary particles from space, the computer categorizes them as high energy or low energy. Then the 3D Projector displays a macroscopic image of the Nano-containment field and particles. You must open and close the separation field, separating the particles, which then provides more entropy to drive the ship's heat engines.
By about "Level 10", you will have first hand experience of the futility of trying to fight the universe's tendency towards disorder. "Delta-S-universe" is always greater than zero.