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arXiv · 1810.05276

Second Thoughts on the Second Law

Stefan Wolf
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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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Stefan Wolf. 2018-10-11. Second Thoughts on the Second Law. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.05276

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