One of Feynman's lesser known works is his lectures on computation.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-Computation-Frontiers-Physics/dp/0738202967" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-Computation-Frontier...</a><p>Feynman is not as expert on the topic as he is on his core research, but his gift for great explanation carries over and makes the material more accessible. The lectures are ground in thermodynamics and the related information theories, and there's a very accessible lecture in there too about Maxwell's Daemon. Most of the material is very foundational and still correct, so it's a good read for anyone who is interested in the area. I'm glad I read it before I had to deal with more complicated and statistical approaches to computation and entropy.
Adjacent work from Fields & Levin 2021 on the thermodynamics of cellular process, arguing that due to the information processing demands and classical thermo minimal power requirements per operation for loose estimates of protein control, aggregate cellular metabolism power requirements are off by 10-15 orders of magnitude of available. They then conclude that cellular processes are using quantum coherent processes for major work internally and externally (p17).<p><a href="https://chrisfieldsresearch.com/quantum-cells-pre.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://chrisfieldsresearch.com/quantum-cells-pre.pdf</a>
if you find this interesting you'll also find the publications of J.P Cruthfield interesting, he seem to have worked in this same institute up to 2004 before moving to UC Davis. he has 20+ years worth of papers on the topic, I keep procrastinating reading them esp the ones about what he calls epsilon machines.<p>I don't really understand this topic, but find the premise interesting enough.<p>here's a paper about<p>the intrinsic cost of modularity
<a href="https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.8.031036" rel="nofollow">https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.8.031...</a><p>Anatomy of a Bit: <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.2988" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.2988</a><p>Modes of Information Flow
<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.06723" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.06723</a><p>stuff related to Landauer's bound
<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.11241" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.11241</a>
<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06650" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06650</a>
<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350794561_Refining_Landauer%27s_Stack_Balancing_Error_and_Dissipation_When_Erasing_Information" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350794561_Refining_...</a>
The underlying paper: <a href="https://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.14.021026" rel="nofollow">https://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.14.021026</a><p>I skimmed it; it's not super accessible.
Is SFI alive after all his founders are long gone? I think so, but really it is increasingly difficult to discern its current unique contribution to the global scientific landscape.
>>Every computing system, biological or synthetic, from cells to brains to laptops, has a cost.<p>Obviously so, fetching tiny potatoes from point A to point B by monkeys has a cost.
From the headline, I thought this was yet another attempt by some silicon valley bro to handwave furiously about everything being thermodynamics. Thankfully, this was not the case.<p>I'm kinda surprised nobody's done this before, given how important estimating wastage is.
Every computing system, biological or synthetic, from cells to brains to laptops, has a cost. This isn’t the price, which is easy to discern, but an energy cost connected to the work required to run a program and the heat dissipated in the process.<p>Researchers at SFI and elsewhere have spent decades developing a thermodynamic theory of computation, but previous work on the energy cost has focused on basic symbolic computations — like the erasure of a single bit — that aren’t readily transferable to less predictable, real-world computing scenarios.