Tag
artificial-energy
- EssayThe Energy That Doesn't Burn
An illustrated children's adaptation of Artificial Energy. For two hundred years humans powered the world with one trick—burning—while the leaf has harvested energy from free-energy gradients, without burning anything, for 3.5 billion years. Twelve pages walk young readers up the energy ladder to Artificial Energy: machines clever enough to choose which energy to catch, the twin sibling of AI.
- EssayWhy von Neumann Was Right
John von Neumann's 1948 instruction to Shannon—call your information measure entropy—was a statement of mathematical identity, not convenience: Boltzmann's thermodynamic entropy and Shannon's information entropy are the same function. This essay traces that identity through Jaynes, Maxwell's Demon, and the Landauer limit to a single number fixed by fundamental constants: at 298 K, erasing one bit costs about 0.0178 eV, while a single carbon–hydrogen bond holds roughly 240 times as much. The gap between the cost of knowing and the cost of moving matter is written into the electromagnetic structure of the universe.
- EssayArtificial Energy
Energy has been misnamed for two hundred years. Names three tiers—mass-destruction (combustion, fission, fusion), passive gradient harvesting (solar, wind, hydro), and the information-rich frontier it calls Artificial Energy: matter engineered to harvest free-energy gradients selectively, as the biosphere has for 3.5 billion years—and argues AE is the natural peer of Artificial Intelligence as a civilizational technology layer.