Related papers: A universal tradeoff between power, precision and …
A unified thermodynamic formalism describing the efficiency of learning is proposed. First, we derive an inequality, which is more strength than Clausius's inequality, revealing the lower bound of the entropy-production rate of a subsystem.…
Recent experiments have indicated that many biological systems self-organise near their critical point, which hints at a common design principle. While it has been suggested that information transmission is optimized near the critical…
Much of today's sustainability discourse emphasizes efficiency, clean technologies, and smart systems, but largely underestimates fundamental physical constraints relating to energy-matter interactions. These constraints stem from the fact…
Theoretical physicists have been fascinated by the phenomena of life for more than a century. As we engage with more realistic descriptions of living systems, however, things get complicated. After reviewing different reactions to this…
In computer science, we can theoretically neatly separate transmission and processing of information, hardware and software, and programs and their inputs. This is much more intricate in biology, Nevertheless, I argue that Shannon's concept…
We investigate energy and momentum non-contact exchanges between two arbitrary flat media separated by a gap. This problem is revisited as a transmission problem of individual system eigenmodes weighted by a transmission probability…
Individual components such as cells, particles, or agents within a larger system often require detailed understanding of their relative position to act accordingly, enabling the system as a whole to function in an organised and efficient…
Fundamental limits on the controllability of physical systems are discussed in the light of information theory. It is shown that the second law of thermodynamics, when generalized to include information, sets absolute limits to the minimum…
We consider the thermodynamic properties of systems in contact with an information source and focus on the consequences of energetic cost associated with the exchange of information. To this end we introduce the model of a thermal tape and…
A major achievement in the study of complex networks is the observation that diverse systems, from sub-cellular biology to social networks, exhibit universal topological characteristics. Yet this universality does not naturally translate to…
Outside ideal settings, conventions are shaped by competing processes that can challenge the emergence of norms. This paper identifies three trade-offs challenging the diffusion of conventions: (I) the trade-off between the imperatives of…
Thermodynamic cost of communication is a major factor in the thermodynamic cost of real-world computers, both biological and digital. Despite its importance, the fundamental principles underlying this cost remain poorly understood. This…
We derive a universal bound on the efficiency with which "dissipated" work can generate distinguishable changes in a quantum many-body state at a finite temperature, as quantified by the quantum Fisher information. The bound follows solely…
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
A notion of directed information between two continuous-time processes is proposed. A key component in the definition is taking an infimum over all possible partitions of the time interval, which plays a role no less significant than the…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
We analytically derive universal bounds that describe the trade-off between thermodynamic cost and precision in a sequence of events related to some internal changes of an otherwise hidden physical system. The precision is quantified by the…
The possibility to describe the laws of the Universe in a computational way seems to be correlated to a principle that the density of information is bounded. This principle, that is dual to that of a finite velocity of information, has…
Modern digital electronics support remarkably reliable computing, especially given the challenge of controlling nanoscale logical components that interact in fluctuating environments. However, we demonstrate that the high-reliability limit…
The study of motility control by smart agents offers a promising platform for systematically exploring the fundamental physical constraints underlying the functioning of bio-inspired micro-machines operating far from equilibrium. Here, we…