[FRIAM] Physicists discover time may move in discrete ‘chunks’

[Owen Densmore]

Interesting work being done at SFI on how processes progress through time:

https://medium.com/predict/physicists-discover-time-can-move-in-discrete-chunks-ec5e826a7395

The paper is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09542-x

A quote from the medium.com article:

The authors stumbled on the necessity of hidden states and hidden timesteps
while searching for the most energy-efficient way to flip a bit of
information in a computer.

That investigation — part of a larger effort to understand the
thermodynamics of computation — revealed that there is no direct way to
implement a map that both sends 1 to 0 and also sends 0 to 1. Rather, in
order to flip a bit of information, the bit must proceed through at least
one hidden state and involve at least three hidden time steps.


Thermodynamics turns up in the weirdest places!

   -- Owen
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20190422/74f0bbc9/attachment.html>