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Landauer's principle bounds the heat generated by logical operations, but in practice the thermodynamic cost of computation is dominated by the control systems that implement logic. CMOS gates dissipate energy far above the Landauer bound,…
The Sapient Paradox is the apparently unexplainable time delay of several ten thousand years following the arrival of Homo sapiens in Asia and Europe and before the introduction of impressive innovations with the agricultural revolution.…
Whether we are alone in the universe is one of the greatest mysteries facing humankind. Given the >100 billion stars in our galaxy, many have argued that it is statistically unlikely that life, including intelligent life, has not emerged…
Popular culture (movies, SF literature) and witness accounts of close encounters with extraterrestrials provide a rather bizarre image of Aliens behavior on Earth. It is far from stereotypes of human space exploration. The reported Aliens…
Thermodynamics is a branch of science blessed by an unparalleled combination of generality of scope and formal simplicity. Based on few natural assumptions together with the four laws, it sets the boundaries between possible and impossible…
In a previous work (M. Campisi. Stud. Hist. Phil. M. P. 36 (2005) 275-290) we have addressed the mechanical foundations of equilibrium thermodynamics on the basis of the Generalized Helmholtz Theorem. It was found that the volume entropy…
Using a recent published formula for the number of information N that results from Landauer's principle we obtain an expression for the cosmological constant Lambda. Next, assuming the universe as a system of mass M satisfying Landauer's…
Entropy production is a fundamental concept that plays a crucial role in the second law of thermodynamics and the measure of irreversibility. It imposes rigorous constraints on the kinds of transformations allowed in thermodynamic…
We investigate an asymptotically spatially flat Robertson-Walker spacetime from two different perspectives. First, using von Neumann entropy, we evaluate the entanglement generation due to the encoded information in spacetime. Then, we work…
Landauer's principle introduces a symmetry between computational and physical processes: erasure of information, a logically irreversible operation, must be underlain by an irreversible transformation dissipating energy. Monitoring micro-…
Time is one of the undisputed foundations of our life in the real world. Here it is argued that inside small isolated quantum systems, time does not pass as we are used to, and it is primarily in this sense that quantum objects enjoy only…
In two recent papers, Maroney and Turgut separately and independently show generalisations of Landauer's erasure principle to indeterministic logical operations, as well as to logical states with variable energies and entropies. Here we…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been heavily influenced by solutions to the Drake Equation, which returns an integer value for the number of communicating civilisations resident in the Milky Way, and by the Fermi…
Landauer's principle states that the erasure of one bit of information requires the free energy kT ln 2. We argue that the reliability of the bit erasure process is bounded by the accuracy inherent in the statistical state of the energy…
The issue of the Gibbs paradox is that when considering mixing of two gases within classical thermodynamics, the entropy of mixing appears to be a discontinuous function of the difference between the gases: it is finite for whatever small…
On broadly Copernican grounds, we are entitled to assume that apparently behaviorally sophisticated extraterrestrial entities ("aliens") would be conscious. Otherwise, we humans would be inexplicably, implausibly lucky to have…
Landauer's erasure principle states that any irreversible erasure protocol of a single bit memory needs work of at least $k_B T ln2.$ Recent proof of concept experiments has demonstrated that the erasure protocols with work close to the…
The inference of entangled quantum states by recourse to the maximum entropy principle is considered in connection with the recently pointed out problem of fake inferred entanglement [R. Horodecki, {\it et al.}, Phys. Rev. A {\it 59} (1999)…
Thermodynamics and information have intricate interrelations. Often thermodynamics is considered to be the logical premise to justify that information is physical - through Landauer's principle -, thereby also linking information and…
Luttinger's theorem for Fermi liquids equates the volume enclosed by the Fermi surface in momentum space to the electron filling, independent of the strength and nature of interactions. Motivated by recent momentum balance arguments that…