Second Thoughts on the Second Law

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-98355-4_27MaRDI QIDQ6163645zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors S. Wolf

Publication date 30 June 2023

Published in Adventures Between Lower Bounds and Higher Altitudes (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.05276

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Coding and information theory (compaction, compression, models of communication, encoding schemes, etc.) (aspects in computer science) (68P30) General topics in the theory of computing (68Q01) Algorithmic information theory (Kolmogorov complexity, etc.) (68Q30) Classical and relativistic thermodynamics (80A10) Quantum coherence, entanglement, quantum correlations (81P40)

Abstract: We speculate whether the second law of thermodynamics has more to do with Turing machines than steam pipes. It states the logical reversibility of reality as a computation, i.e., the fact that no information is forgotten: nature computes with Toffoli-, not NAND gates. On the way there, we correct Landauer's erasure principle by directly linking it to lossless data compression, and we further develop that to a lower bound on the energy consumption and heat dissipation of a general computation.

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Cites work

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Cited in

(18)

• What does it mean to say that a physical system implements a computation?
• An amendment to the second law
• Foundations of generalized reversible computing
• A note on the entropy of computation
• Thermodynamics of natural selection. II: Chemical Carnot cycles
• Thermodynamics of natural selection. III: Landauer's principle in computation and chemistry
• The physics of implementing logic: Landauer's principle and the multiple-computations theorem
• Reverse data-processing theorems and computational second laws
• Landauer defended: reply to Norton
• Dependence of dissipation on the initial distribution over states
• Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process
• Thermodynamic aspects of confidentiality
• Can the second law be compatible with time reversal invariant dynamics?
• The universal algorithm
• Second thoughts on the second law
• The fundamental thermodynamic bounds on finite models
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 5879460 (Why is no real title available?)
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 5879471 (Why is no real title available?)

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