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

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[gepr]

Thanks for posting this!

On 4/22/19 9:09 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:

> 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 <http://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!

--
☣ uǝlƃ

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove