Why Pure Information Gives Off Heat

Over the hills and far away, deep in the seas and up rivers and valleys, species and entire civilizations have risen and flourished for generations . . . . and then vanished, consumed quickly or by something long coming. Time erodes everything indiscriminately; from dust to dust we all come and go. To make an indelible mark, some energy conversion has to take place. The longer a mark in size and longer the amount of time it has to be kept in its mint condition, the more it costs to store it. Everything decays and has a half-life, even a black hole. A deep hole can hold its form over cosmological stretches of time and yet its Hawking radiation causes it to radiate away its mass and vanish as though the entire life of a black hole were nothing but a virtual process carried out by reversible unitary operators. The Don Page curve for the entropy of a black hole looks like a shark fin showing the entropy of a blackhole rising up as it absorbs more matter, and then, at the peak of its consumption, at the tip of the fin, the entropy slowly and then more rapidly makes a decline to zero as it quantum-mechanically radiates away its mass as Stephen Hawking predicted in 1974. As the space-time partition at the horizon dissolves away, the entanglement entropy has to go down. Can a Don Page like curve apply to cosmology as a whole? Can a perpetually expanding universe go super-relativistic and bring its entropy back down? When the lightcones become like needles and everything goes acasual, we can have a new big bang and do it all again like some virtual process. Everything material, even biomass, arises from "dust" and goes back to dust cycling through 5 Kingdoms (animals, plants, fungi, prokaryotes, and protoctists). Material things come with cycles and rhythms of their own; we have distinct cycles for carbon, nitrogen, water and oxygen. The energy for moving the material cycles, this energy gets degraded and cannot be used again. You can't burn a piece of coal twice. Time dissolves everything ..... but fat and wrinkles. Whatever gets done can be undone in a sequence of creation and annihilation operators (raising and lowering operators) that brings all the branches back together again as if nothing had ever happened. Buddhist monks in the Himalayas have a demonstration of how everything fades and nothing appears to be steady or permanent. Using tiny grains of sand of different colors, they slowly over a few days (or hours) let the grains trickle down onto an open floor that everyone can see. After making an exquisite sand painting with intertwining threads, we behold it in awe and take a picture, just as a crazy monk with a broom sweeps it away! Although the painting and its structure has vanished from view or even being touched, we did get a glimpse of it and even more important, we have the artists who made it and a vague idea of how they did it. They carry with them a gentle vital spark to create something new or the same thing again, albeit, in a different time and setting. The vanishing of a loved one, hope or dream does not take away any of the past that did occur. As so aptly said by Tennyson, 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.' The fleeting transitory nature of material things brings into question whether anything can make a lasting mark. If unitary processes account for everything, then anything that can be made ... can also be unmade as if it never happened. A field of raising and lowering operators (snakes 'n ladders) can start from any state or nothing at all and simulate every increase or decrease in the number of every type of particle at every location. Stars like our own sun can light up for billions of years in a remarkably stable state considering the whole thing acts like a thermonuclear furnace. Eventually, the rich initial supply of fuel gets consumed and the sun goes into a Red Giant phase. Our sun looses its blues and winds down into a cooler phase for the sunset of its life. From the perspective of Earthlings, the Red Giant looks ominously large. If nothing gets done to stop the natural sequence of events, the giant swells up in size, floods the space around it with particles and drowns the earth. Will Earth be washed away as if it were some virtual process? The Earth gets flooded and overwhelmed, unless by chance, its unique moon can be engineered to tug the Earth up and out of harm's way towards Saturn! Perhaps Venus and Mercury can also be saved. Probably not; they have thick atmospheres and no moons. An entirely different strategy than that for moving asteroids or our moon would have to come into play. We have billions of years to think about it and to experiment with arranging asteroids to make a gateway to Jupiter and Saturn and their many moons. Grasses sway, flowers bring out colors, scents and then seeds that fan out far and wide. Summer's production and biomass rises high and then settles into the earth. Winter comes and Summer's bounty vanishes from sight. Although much seems done and undone, Spring comes with her own artistic expressions.

Scott Ready