From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Jun 08 2001 - 05:32:04 MDT
fredagen den 8 juni 2001 09:16 hal@finney.org wrote:
> In asking for energy from information, you are thinking of the first
> term, delta energy to make things happen. But actually with information
> you are already in position to drive a mechanism using the second term,
> delta entropy. All that highly ordered information is just waiting to
> be randomized and turned into entropy.
>
> In principle you can use this to drive an engine just like you can
> use energy. I think there are some chemical and perhaps biological
> phenomena which can be thought of as entropy engines (evaporating water
> is a trivial example).
A better example is the dissolution of ammonium nitrate in water. The entropy
increase is so high that the otherwise endothermic reaction still takes
place, cooling the mixture enough to freeze the water if you have enough
nitrate.
A blank computer memory is in a sense a cold reservoir, although the energy
that can be released by randomizing it is rather small - k T ln 2 J/bit.
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