3 ms·
I recently scored a copy of Maxwell's Demon, a book containing a collection of (among others) Landauer and Bennett's papers. As I was skimming them, I couldn't
by cscheid 13y ago
I recently scored a copy of Maxwell's Demon, a book containing a collection of (among others) Landauer and Bennett's papers. As I was skimming them, I couldn't help but think that if there is a correspondence between heat and information erasure, can that be used to move "heat" in a fundamentally different way?
The idea would be you do some computation at point A, the related information erasure at point B, and the heat associated with it get "transported" faster than it would be by moving pipes around. The hope is that sending the bits along something like an optical network would be faster than laminar fluid flow.
I'm sure HN's more knowledgeable folks will tell me exactly where I'm wrong, but it seemed like an intriguing possibility.
- tree_of_item 13y agoThere's a comment on the post by Tim Tyler talking about "digital heat", which seems to be close to your idea. He's written more about it here: http://cell-auto.com/reversible/ http://cell-auto.com/reversible/
- SilasX 13y agoI've long wondered something similar about energy storage: could you store energy by spending to learn the times when you should open the doors (in the Maxwell's Demon though experiment) to sort the molecules? In that case, you could get much better energy storage densities because you'd only be limited by how densely you can store information. (It's know that you can't generate energy by opening doors in a chamber at just the right times to let fast molecules go on one side and slow on the other. This is because you'd have to spend just as much energy learning when to open the doors. However, that's not a barrier to using this technique to store rather than generate energy.)