What's the News: Anyone who has had their thighs baked by a laptop knows that computing releases heat. And it's more than a common-sense maxim: physicists have shown that heat released by information processing is bound by a physical law, where a bit of information processed must cause a corresponding rise in temperature. But could quantum mechanics allow computations that actually cool computers down? In a recent Nature paper
, researchers describe how this paradox is possible. How the Heck:
In this paper, the team describes how, using the quantum mechanical property of entanglement, an observer can actually drain heat from a system while deleting information.
How, you say? It all comes down to a question of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a system is always increasing or remaining the same, but never decreasing. And the way we usually experience it, entropy is heat. ...
