Scientists convert information to energy for the first time
Japanese researchers reported in the web edition of natural physics, published in November 15th, that they have made a nano ball crawl up the "ladder" made by an electric field in the laboratory, and the energy needed to crawl is made by the particle. The transformation of the information at any given time in any direction means that scientists have first realized the transformation of information into energy in the laboratory, verifying the idea of "the Maxwell demon", proposed by James Clark Maxwell, a British physicist about 150 years ago.
the team led by Toritani Beshoichi of the Centre College Department of science and technology at the Centre College and Sano Masaki of University of Tokyo in the laboratory crept up a tiny rotating staircase made of a diameter of 287 nanometers along the electric field and photographed the ball. The ball can move in any direction at random. As the upward climb increases the potential energy, the lower probability of the ball will be greater. If there is no human interference, the ball will eventually fall to the bottom. In the experiment, when the ball climbed up the ladder, the researchers used the electric field to add a "wall" to the ladder on the ball, so that the ball could not go back to the lower layer, so that the ball could climb up.
the ball can climb the ladder completely by the information of "own position", and researchers do not have to exert any external force (such as injecting new energy, for example), only an induction system (such as a camera). In addition, they can accurately measure how much energy is converted from information.
this is the first time that Maxwell demon has been realized in experiments. In 1871, Maxwell proposed the "Maxwell demon" idea that an adiabatic vessel was divided into two equal lattices, and the middle was a plate door controlled by a mechanism. The air molecules in the container hit the door when they did irregular heat movement, and the doors could selectively put faster molecules (higher temperatures) into them. One lattice will put slower molecules (lower temperature) into another case, so that the temperature of the two lattice will be higher and lower. Maxwell believes that the energy used in the whole process is the information that "molecules are hot or cold". The
"Maxwell demon" seems to be contrary to the second law of thermodynamics, in other words, this process can not be used to separate hot molecules and cold molecules without energy loss. Later, the Hungarian physicist von Laue pointed out that the process did not violate the laws of physics, because the "Maxwell demon" actually had to consume energy to determine which molecule was hot and which molecule was cold. In this experiment, the energy of the loss is the conversion of the camera's energy through information.
they think this is a new mechanism, which is called the "information - thermal mechanism", which means that information can be used as a medium to transform energy even if it is not directly exposed to a nano machine.
the Hassel University of Belgium, who was not involved in the study, said that the new experiment directly proved that information could be converted into energy, but that new technologies could not solve the energy crisis that human beings are facing. "When the information is converted into energy, the real energy cost is hidden outside (the operator of the experiment), so the experiment is like people trying to use nuclear fusion to generate energy, and the nuclear reaction itself costs more energy."
researchers themselves also say that the cameras in the experiment are clumsy, and now the urgent task is to find the microtechnology that can automatically detect the environment and convert the collected information into energy.
the "information - thermal mechanism" at the nanoscale level still looks like a modern version of the perpetual perpetual mechanism before the mechanism and mechanism of "information conversion to energy" is not further explained. The three laws of thermodynamics in nineteenth Century have been put forward one after another, which not only laid a basic complete foundation for thermodynamics, but also made the law of conservation and transformation of energy almost perfect. But in the past two hundred years, people have been racking their brains to try to achieve the Arabian Nights myth. Although we believe that any kind of truth has its limitations, the first thing we think about is sun Dagan and his Kun stick when the maid's "fog" is a "rational existence of atomic scale".