From: scerir (scerir@libero.it)
Date: Fri Jun 08 2001 - 03:12:12 MDT
> Leonardo Gonzalez:
> I had a crazy idea some time ago...
> the generation of energy from information.
> Might there be a way to harness the organized structure
> of information and extract from it a form of energy?
Tom Stonier [Information and the Internal Structure
of the Universe, Springer-Verlag, 1990] wrote about
that [chapter 6: About the interrelationship between
information and energy; chapter 7: Information and work].
There are, of course, many kinds of information (structural,
kinetic, ...). There are, of course, many kinds of energy
(potential, kinetic, ...). Potential energy, i.e., describes
a process in which a change in energy can be linked to
a change in the organisational (and also informational?)
state of the system.
If a stone were dropped in a pool of still water, the waves
would be produced from the exchange of energy. Are these
waves the information? Can we reverse this process?
Anyway, to copy some information it's very easy, to copy
some energy .....
-S.
Consider the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. Mix distilled water (no
chloride), sulfuric acid, malonic acid, sodium bromate, and a redox
indicator like Ferroin (iron(II)tris(penanthroline)). Stir it up to a
nice homogeneous aqueous solution, pour a millimeter depth into a flat
Petri dish, watch it spontaneously evolve red and blue propagating
large-scale structure. Stir it up to homogeneity, it spontaneously
reorders itself. Take the bulk stuff, add some cerium sulfate. Now
you have the Traffic Light. It oscillates red and green a few dozen
times, oscillating about its equilibrium point instead of smoothly
asymptotically aproaching it as equilibrium thermodynamics predicts.
[see "Chemical Demonstrations," Bassam Z. Shakhashiri]
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