How gem-gum factories link to deep mysteries of the universe

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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.

The game of time

Imagine the abstract concept of the present (as in "right now") being represented as an card game.

First of: Note that we pretend to play in a timeless imaginary space "of the gods" if you will. Ignore the time it takes to draw and lay out cards. Our "arrow of time" will emerge from something else.

There are three players:

  • You (also called passive observer in this game)
  • The dealer (Also called physical law in this game)
  • The system designer

Cards represent so called microstates. A microstate is:

  • the information of the positions and
  • the information of the velocities (plus masses) of all of the particles of the system.

Systems can be arbitrarily chosen in size by on the system designer. Just a few cards or so many cards that they wouldn't fit in the whole observable universe. For all games (but one special game) you as the player can decide with which system designer to play.

Beside the microstate the cards also feature one of two colors

  • There are green cards
  • There are red cards

Each color represent a very big group of similar allowed microstates. The green cards are (per definition) the group of microstates that is bigger. Well, there may be more then just two groups and blurry areas of microstates with more or less similarity. But in the end all the eventually blurry sub-grouped mess is just groups down to two groups.

There are two decks

  • M: a very big one with all combinatorically possible microstates (not reachable though)
  • N: a big one with all the microstates that are reachable from the last card you've drawn – according to the rules that the system designer set up

The second deck (the N deck) is constantly updated by the dealer depending on the card that was drawn last.

The rules of the games are simple. You just draw cards one after the other from the changing N deck and lay them out in a row. After every drawn card

  • the dealer must check the microstate that you've drawn.
  • the dealer must remove all the microstate cards that are no longer reachable from the newly drawn microstate – cards from N to M
  • the dealer must add all the microstate cards that are newly reachable from the newly drawn microstate – cards from M to N

As the player while playing you must add up all the cards and write the successive sums below. Green cards count plus one time-unit red cards count minus one time-unit. Super simple.

Unless the system designer screwed up you will notice that on average the successive sum of the time-units increases.

Tadaa!! You finally have time. (To almost cite Terry Pratchett)

The reason is simple. When you draw from card decks decks that always have more green cards inside than red cards then you obviously will draw more green ones than red ones over time.

Since the green cards are per definition the more common cards in all the possible N decks the worst thing that can happen is that red and green cards become equally common. Then time no longer runs froward. The concept of time ceases to exist. The system runs into its own little personal heat death.

The details about how the microstates evolve in our "timeless game space" (and lead to emergence of time):

  • include which microstates the system fundamentally allows
  • include which microstate transitions the system allows from which other microstates
  • are given by what the nature of the system (and thus the system designer for any artificial system).

Limits of the analogy

Note that this intuitively graspable game analogy glosses over a lot.

  • Quantum entanglement allowing quantum parallel players?
  • Chaotic multi body problem?

The proper math that goes in exactly is in statistical physics.

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).

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.

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 leas 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.

Related

External links

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