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I wouldn't. It's nice to show these effects in practice. In fact, I would have added a part 1.5 that gave theoretical bounds for how much heat can be dissipat
by zeroer 10y ago
I wouldn't. It's nice to show these effects in practice. In fact, I would have added a part 1.5 that gave theoretical bounds for how much heat can be dissipated from a volume that contains N bits.
- smallnamespace 10y agoHeat dissipation is proportional to the surface area, so this suggests a reason that information density is (physically) bound by surface area, rather than volume.
- klodolph 10y agoAnother factor that gives the same limit in theory is gravity. If you have a volume of space and start shoving hard drives in it, eventually the hard drives will collapse into a black hole, and your information density is limited by the surface area of the black hole—again, giving you O(R^2) bits of storage for a volume with radius R.
- zeroer 10y agoThat's explicitly mentioned in the article.
- klodolph 10y agoIt's mentioned in the second article in the series, not the linked article.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- amelius 10y agoInteresting. Perhaps a stupid question but is this somehow related to the recently proposed theory which says that the universe is essentially a hologram?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- smallnamespace 10y agoOne way it's related: if a volume's information only depends on its surface area, then you can imagine the volume is really just a hologram with the same number of bits, and the bits are directly embedded on the surface of that hologram.
- klodolph 10y agoFrom what I understand, the holographic principle (the theory you mentioned) was inspired by the consequences of black hole thermodynamics.
- zeroer 10y agoExactly!
- Retra 10y agoThere's only so much surface area you can fit in a given volume.
- lloeki 10y agoHelge von Koch begs to differ ;-) Also, simple counterexamples: https://people.emich.edu/aross15/math121/misc/love-1989-supersolids.pdf https://people.emich.edu/aross15/math121/misc/love-1989-supe...
- Retra 10y agoHow are those counterexamples? I'm not talking about abstract mathematical geometry, I'm talking about actual physics. A paper that says "just drill infinite holes in a cube" isn't relevant here.
- lloeki 10y agoStuffing hard drives together until they form a perfect Schwartzchild black hole is hardly "actual physics", so I posited we're long into abstract constructs giving theoretical upper bounds.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]