7 ms·
On-Chip Maxwell's Demon as an Information-Powered Refrigerator
- api 11y agoIs it possible to transmit energy as information, and if so at what efficiency? I can imagine some crazy sci-fi possibilities there... like Dyson Swarm type solar power satellites that beam power anywhere as a data stream.
- ta0967 11y agoit is possible, we use it to transmit information as energy.
- tedsanders 11y agoInformation and energy are related because having information about a system allows you extract usable energy from it and do work. If I have a bucket of bouncing balls, and you send me a stream of bits that tells me the configuration of those balls, suddenly my ability to do work has risen because I can now efficiently extract energy from those balls. In that sense, energy can be transmitted as information. I don't think there's a more direct way of doing what your question suggests because sending energy (whether it is informative or not) always means that energy is sent. Because energy is conserved, if my energy goes up, then somewhere else in space something else's energy has gone down, and that change is, by definition, sending energy.
- api 11y agoThat's what I mean. It's not a conservation violation, but I could see it as a very interesting way of transmitting energy across long distances. Even if it were inefficient it could still have some fascinating applications.
- digi_owl 11y agoBest i can tell, information means you can make a measurement. As such, information and energy is one and the same.
- vanderZwan 11y agoSo I know that a concept of "entropy" is used in both information theory and thermodynamics. Is there any significant overlap?
- digi_owl 11y agoDon't think so, but i do not have a deep enough understanding of either to make a conclusive statement.
- mchahn 11y agoI remember reading that maxwell's daemon couldn't work because the minimum power requirement of flipping the gate would offset the daemon gain. Either that is wrong or this has a different method of operation than the classical definition that maxwell gave.
- digi_owl 11y agoWell if i recall the whole demon thing correctly, it was about having a gate that would allow particles to travel only one way. Basically unless we are operating at absolute zero (zero kelvin), all particles are moving around to a greater or lesser degree (aka heat). Entropy, iirc, comes about in physics from having regions of greater or lesser "heat". With the understanding that over time, particles in hotter regions will travel to colder regions until there is a uniform distribution (heat death of the universe ultimately). The demon was about filtering this movement to reverse the process, by blocking movement from hot to cold, but not from cold to hot. But as the demon/filter can't operate without producing waste heat itself, and that heat will not be subject to the filter, it basically can't do its job. That is at least the undestanding this layman has reached about the subject.
- codeulike 11y agoPeter Watts runs with this idea in novels Blindsight and Echopraxia
- Animats 11y agoAnother illustration of how real quantum mechanics is. The universe really does work that way.
- swehner 11y agoDid someone say Babel Fish?
- ivan_ah 11y agopreprint version of paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.00530 http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.00530
- blincoln 11y agoProbably a dumb question, but I skimmed through the full paper and didn't find an obvious answer: does this actually result in an effect that could (theoretically) be scaled up to make an air conditioner-style device that pumps colder-than-ambient air out in one direction and hotter-than-ambient air out in another? Or is it more of a technical curiosity? Or something else?