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  • Maxwell's Demon in the Real World - Information as Fuel Talk by Susanne Still

Dr. Susanne Still shares the real-world implications of Maxwell's Demon, the thought experiment that challenges the second law of thermodynamics. Drawing on her research into the role of information in physical systems, Still discusses using information as fuel and how it can be harnessed to better understand and manipulate the natural world.

Keywords: Maxwell's Demon, Still, IAF Information Fuel TWCF

Maxwell's Demon is a decision-making process, driven by information.

However, since "information" is purely symbolic in nature, attempting to use "information" as fuel, makes as little sense as trying to use an alphabet as fuel; the physical substances being employed to represent the "information" may be used as fuel, but never the "information" itself. You can burn a piece of paper, with an alphabet printed on it, but that is not even the same sort of thing, as burning the alphabet itself.

Here is the fundamental misunderstanding that all physicists seem to have, regarding "Information":
At 8:06 in the video, the "Information Ratchet" is supposed to "Wait for an 'up' fluctuation", but not all 'up' fluctuations represent "information." Only the "up" fluctuations that were actually caused by the "system of interest" are "information"; those caused by any other systems, including the ambient, environmental "noise", are not "information". The entire point of Shannon's Information Theory, is that the intended receiver of "information", needs to be able to distinguish those two types of "up" fluctuations, with perfect accuracy, and consequently, never mistake an "unintended" up fluctuation, for an "intended" one.

As Shannon demonstrated, this can be done by exploiting the auto-correlation and cross-correlation properties of long, random sequences.

And that is the problem with every "Bell test"; "unintended" spin-up detections (AKA bit-errors) are not being distinguished from the "intended" ones.

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