Part 5/9:
The first significant attempt to tackle the paradox came from Léon Brillouin, who introduced the notion of information theory into thermodynamic discussions in the late 1920s. He revised Maxwell's original setup to focus on just a single molecule and expanded the role of the demon. Instead of merely opening a door to sort molecules by speed, Brillouin's demon would determine the location of the only molecule and, upon identifying it, manipulate the system to extract usable work. Crucially, he argued, when the demon acquires information about the molecule's position, this process incurs an entropy cost equal to ( kT \log 2 ), where ( k ) is Boltzmann's constant and ( T ) is the temperature.