English

Second Thoughts on the Second Law

Quantum Physics 2018-10-15 v1 History and Philosophy of Physics

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.05276,
  title  = {Second Thoughts on the Second Law},
  author = {Stefan Wolf},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.05276},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1702.00923

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:37:04.559Z