The principle the article is implicitly talking about is Landauer's principle [1]. It states that if information is lost in a system, it must be as heat dissipation.
The idea that in Physics, Heat = Information, that is, an identity or potential identity.
Now, i'm currently 50/50 on that idea, that is, that Heat = Information (and vice versa).
I'd love to see something which conclusively proves this, with say, the rigor of a mathematical or logical proof.
Also, if Heat = Information, then we need some way of accounting for what happens when a system cools, that is, how does the information (again, without being lost) propagate into the environment, such that when an object cools, no information is lost?
As I said, I'm 50/50 on this idea... I'd like to see a really good proof. The best proof would be short, logical, and highly consistent... Prove to me that no information is lost, or are we just accepting that because heat physically difuses and no heat is lost, that no information is as well?
That would be both a simple and logical explanation, but then we'd have to search the entire universe for no physical anomaly (to be sure that we're absolutely correct), that is, there's no exceptional case where heat in a system was lost or gained without exchange with an external system... which is quite the search, let me tell you!
See, if we think that heat is never lost in the universe, we got that idea from somewhere... it may have been given to us as one of the first axioms given to us in an elementary Physics class... but where does it come from that brought it there, and why do we never question it?
Help me to understand...
OK, here's my problem... Soil temperature. That is, when you dig more than a few feet into the soil, more than a few feet into the ground -- what you'll find is consistent ground temperature, no matter what part of the world you're in, no matter how hot or how cold the above climate is.
See, if there is conservation of heat, and the center of our planet is as hot as the sun -- then why doesn't/hasn't this heat diffused out across the entire interior of the planet?
If you heat soil that's more than a few feet down up, it's going to cool, and if you cool it, it's going to heat back up.
Sure, you could argue that this heat is moved and diffused into the adjacent ground/soil, but are we really sure that there isn't some other kind of phenomena going on there?
Objects get very cool in outer space... near zero, yet they get hot, extremely hot, when the suns rays, unshielded by the earth's atmosphere, touch them.
How do objects cool down in space, if by definition, space is a vacuum, and vacuum = thermal insulation?
In other words, I have a Thermos(tm), with a vaccuum chamber inside of it on one hand, and the vaccuum of outer space on the other.
The Thermos keeps my cold beverages cold, and my hot beverages hot. It does this by preventing thermal dissipation. It does this by putting a vacuum between the interior and exterior containers.
In outer space, on the other hand, if sunlight is blocked for whatever reason, temperatures of objects get very, very cold. Where does the heat (aka, information) go, if space is a vacuum?
You see, the paradoxes with respect to vacuums, and thus heat transfer in vacuums, and thus Heat = Information abound...
Perhaps they would be solved if heat could travel through the vacuum (radiant energy?) in an effect much like Quantum Tunneling -- just the outer space / heat -- version of that?
I'm not an expert in any of these areas... Can anyone help me out?
"If there is black body radiation everywhere in space -- then why doesn't space itself heat up until it's eventually the temperature of the Sun?"
Maybe objects in space, such as planets, act as "heat drains" for the rest of space... that is, all of the heat (information) in space eventually winds up at a physical planet, or other object in space...
If this is true, then this leads to an interesting identity, which is basically that every element, that is, everything on the periodic table from hydrogen on downward, is not just an element, not just matter, but also has an identity in terms of heat/information...
In other words, every single element (and by extension substance) is what it is, but could also be thought about simultaneously as heat, and simultaneously as information.
Which brings up endothermic/exothermic chemical reactions.
That is, chemical reactions between two or more elements (for example, hydrogen and oxygen combining to produce water) where heat is produced (combining them via fire), or where heat is consumed (note that the separation of water into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis, as far as I know, is neither endothermic or exothermic -- so where did the information go? Into the electricity? It's possible, we can't rule out that possibility...)
And then the next question... Do chemical elements combined as a compound (such as water) then store the information as heat from the reaction somehow, or does it somehow dissipate, does that information somehow come back when they are separated?
I don't know the answer to any of these questions; I'm just thinking aloud, but my intutive mind says that there may be something to discover there...
Change of state is equivalent mathematically to movement in a "dimension."
I'd love to discover more information about that idea!
URLs and/or book recommendations about that topic would be most appreciated!
The simplest states that exist in the largest dimensions we know of are the position/spacetime states. String theory posits that these little tiny looped strings of matter, exist in dimensions that are on the verge of a planck length. They just loop around. If you went from where you are, to where I am, you'll have looped around those tiny string dimensions a crap ton of times.
Write a blog, please!
I'd read it...
Your thermos example is a bit confusing because it's a thin wall. For understanding heat transfer it's better to use medium thickness walls. It's hard for me to come up with a real-world example that we'd have intimate familiarity with because we can't typically reach inside a solid material with our fingers.
I'd like to point out this illustration[0] though, which is used in many university textbooks for introduction to transport phenomena (the study of mass and heat flows). If you have a near-perfect insulator and expose one side to heat, the other side will remain cool. Between the one side and the other, the temperature must gradually change from hot to cold.
The earth is a pretty big insulator, so it keeps most of the core's heat in, and makes the surface much cooler than the core. Different layers of the earth have different properties, so the "steepness" of that transition from hot to cold changes suddenly at certain depths where the earths material changes. You can see Earth's temperature gradient here[1].
Definitely, if Earth absolutely could not get rid of its heat, eventually all the layers would be the same temperature. However, enough is lost to space each year to keep the surface "cool". It's actually a very, very, very tiny amount of the heat that is lost to space. The temperature of the core is 5000K-7000K but has only lost 250K over the past 4.5 billion years. Evidently the earth is a particularly good insulator.
I used to help drill pretty deep holes in earth, going down 5,000-10,000 feet or more. Temperature of the earth at that depth could be actually quite hot, like 250-350 degF.
0: (Image of a simple thermal profile through a medium thickness wall of uniform material) https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/3-s2.0-B97801241589170...
1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Te...
2: (Energy balance of earth) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget
3: (Solar energy balance of earth) https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/energy