Machines and the 2nd Law
Post Under Construction
How Logical Functionality and Gain are Implemented in Machines
I’ve been designing machines my whole professional life, never thinking about the fact that we engineers are embedding intelligence in matter/energy, and, from a physics point of view, what it takes to implement this functionality. The short answer is that it requires being able to create state changes with low activation energies. This equates to “unstable equilibrium.” This post is to explain why this is necessary and how we engineers deal with the problems involved and how the techniques we use are different from what we see in life.