Zusammen Gestohlen aus Verschiedenem diesem und jenem

-Ludwig van Beethoven

William Thomson later named this mythical creature Maxwell’s Demon, and physicists and philosophers have been trying to exorcise it ever since. Countless designs for mechanical “demons” have been drafted, and all have been proven ineffective. Even a hypothetical “intelligent” demon, it turns out, must create entropy as it processes the information needed to sort molecules. Although thinking about demons has taught us much about entropy since Maxwell’s time, the verdict seems to be that not even a demon can violate the second law of thermodynamics.

-Daniel V. Schroder, An Introduction to thermal physics

All the compliments that I have received from Arago, Laplace and Biot never gave me so much pleasure as the discovery of a theoretic truth, or the confirmation of a calculation by experiment.

-Fresnel's letter to Thomas Young, 1824