From: Jim Witte (jswitte_at_bloomington.in.us)
Date: Thu Sep 09 2004 - 10:31:40 PDT
On Sep 8, 2004, at 5:37 AM, WL wrote:
> With the heat generated(wasted?) by the faster and faster G's...
Interesting question here: could the heat be recovered by some kind
of IR solar cell technology, or one of those neat solid-state electric
heat pumps (in reverse)? I know, I know, thermodynamics says that heat
is wasted energy and by definition can't be recovered. But could
*some* of it be recovered (possibly made up by degradation of the
heat-conversion chip, which would keep the total entropy the same)
And I remember reading a little science brief (and I do mean brief)
in BusinessWeek a long time ago about some strange technology that used
*reversable* instructions - it sounded (though, this is BusinessWeek..)
that electricity could be run through the system *backwards* to recover
energy lost. I ran into another reference to I think the same thing,
that said this was possible as long as no operation destroyed any
information (so, an AND gate is out I guess..). Aside from seemingly
violating the laws of thermodynamics, this seems completely pointless
from the POV of computing, which MUST generate new information (or is
that WHY it can seemingly violate thermodynamics..).
Any experts in thermodynamics and information theory on this list ?
Jim
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