The thermodynamics of computation is a research focus of physicist and SFI Professor David Wolpert, and for the last few years he’s been collaborating with Artemy Kolchinsky, physicist and former SFI Postdoctoral Fellow, to better understand the connection between thermodynamics and information processing in computation. Since at least the 19 th century, physicists have been investigating the role of entropy in information theory - studying the energy transactions of adding or erasing bits from computers, for example. Or that air will escape a balloon but never, on its own accord, inflate it. The second law guarantees, for example, that an egg can wobble off a table and leave a mess on the floor but that such a mess will never spontaneously form an egg and leap back on the table. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the total entropy of a closed process can increase or stay the same but never decrease.
