Second Thoughts on the Second Law

TL;DR

This paper explores the second law of thermodynamics through the lens of computation, emphasizing logical reversibility and correcting previous principles by linking them to data compression and energy bounds.

Contribution

It introduces a new perspective connecting thermodynamics to computation, correcting Landauer's principle, and deriving bounds on energy use based on lossless data compression.

Findings

Nature computes with reversible gates like Toffoli gates.

Corrects and refines Landauer's erasure principle.

Establishes a lower bound on energy dissipation based on data compression.

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.