Abstract
Brillouin sees order as generated by tapping negentropy sources existing upstream, while Prigogine sees it as generated by dumping entropy downstream. Joining both ideas yields a picture of the computer closely paralleling that of Carnot's heat engine. The difference is that the one delivers information and the other, work. In either case the irretrievable (that is, by definition) loss occurs at the last step. Bennett and Landauer very rightly emphasize this, but their fixation on the condenser blinds them to the necessity of the furnace; thus they are led to believe in the possibility of “perpetual duplication of the second kind,” which Brillouin explicitly denies.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
L. Brillouin,Science and Information Theory, 2nd edn. (Academic, New York, 1962); see especially Chap. 12 and 18.
G. Nicolis and I. Prigogine,Self Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems (Wiley, New York, 1977).
C. H. Bennett,Sci. Am. 257, 108 (1987).
R. Landauer,Appl. Phys. Lett. 51, 2056 (1987).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Costa de Beauregard, O. The computer and the heat engine. Found Phys 19, 725–727 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00731907
Received:
Revised:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00731907