How gem-gum factories link to deep mysteries of the universe
It all starts out with a pretty innocuous question:
How do we maximize the efficiency of a gem-gum factory but still keep it operating properly?
Such that it keeps running forward assembling raw material into products instead of running backwards shoving parts into sections of the factory that
are not designed to operate reversibly and thus getting things stuck or worse break things.
For squeezing the last bit of efficiency out it's not as simple as going from a higher energy compound to a lower energy compound for a drive system. Yes that usually works (not always) but when optimizing for efficiency one needs to look deeper and do better.
What is minimized in solution phase chemistry is Gibbs free energy. Not the potential energy of the chemical bonds alone. (For machine phase instead of solution phase see: Thermodynamic potentials) Thus there are cases where a chemical reaction runs forward despite needing energy to happen (despite being endoergic). These reactions suck up heat from their local environment to run to their completion. One particularly impressive case are calcium chloride (CaCl2) freezing mixtures.
Of course despite extracting kinetic energy out of thermal motions we have no quackery type free energy (perpertuum mobile of second kind) here.
This reaction is finite and something is used up. What is used up is the spacial crystalline order in the salt crystal.
Talking about order and chaos is intuitively pretty incomprehensible though so lets phrase it differently.
The essence for a reaction to run forward has actually little to do with energy but rather with
the number of microstates increasing.
See: Emergence of the arrow of time
Regarding exothermy
Beside exothermy not being the only way that can drive reactions forward but endothermy too: When reactions are driven by their exothermicness then in the end it is also just an increase of the number of microstates. Just in disguise. What is happening here is the following: The heat-up means a greater distribution in velocities (which, just like the positions, count to the microstates).
Assuming no changes in particle numbers in all cases here.
The "advantage" that exothermic reactions have is that the disorder in velocities (heat) that they create can eventually be radiated away out of the system as IR light whereas endothermic reactions can't radiate away the disorder in positions that they create.
If an exothermic reaction has no pathway to dump its energy into lots of microstates with different velocities, then it won't have any motivation to run forward. This is the normal case for two body planetary motion. There are no degrees of freedom where kinetic energy could be dissipated into. Unless the planets literally collide, they won't discharge their energy despite of the fact that that would be astronomically exoergic. Energy just happily oscillates between potential and kinetic (for an elliptic non-circular orbit).
Similar things can happen when two atoms meet in a vacuum. Sometimes a third collision partner is needed for a de-excitation overcoming an otherwise forbidden transition. There is more to this though. Limited analogy.
In piezochemical mechanosynthesis the tool-tip and surface-contact literally form channels for the mictostates to flow out (or in) In machine phase increase in spacial disorder is not allowed. So that means exoergic is the only option. Right? Wrong! Machine phase likely allows one to do a really cool trick. And that is offloading the unconditionally necessary somewhere happening increase in microstates to a site different than the piezochemical mechanosynthesis. There from the outside driving the whole system can be done exothermic or endothermic. And some piezochemical mechanosynthesis steps may be performable in an endothermic cooling the reacton site down and still have low error rates.
Note that with molecular mills even locally exothermic reactions can be performed in an locally endothermic way due to the coupling to the drive system. (TODO: to check)
Related: Exothermy offloading and Dissipation sharing
Concrete Examples
In the sense of the described game a gem-gum factory (when left alone and untampered from outside) literally defines its own direction of time by its own design.
- The mechanical energy management system of a gem-gum factory with coupled piezochemical mechanosynthesis and chemomechanical converters
- the local energy dissipation at tip surface interaction during piezochemical mechanosynthesis.
Mysteries
There is basically a small scale version of the "arrow of time" of the universe embedded in efficiency optimized gem-gum factories.
There seems to be some sort of connection between physical reality and pure side effect free and reversible computing. But a lot of aspects of physical reality make this intractable. Within the highly deterministic framework of gem-gum nanofactories that still directly tap into the smallest scales of physical reality (well, in some regards smallest) this might lead to new surprising insights.
This is quite fascinating and possibly the most direct connection between the hands on practical world and totally wacky philosophical speculations.
