Well, here’s one effort:
Significance: Around 100 y ago, Szilard imagined how to raise a weight without doing any work, just using the information gained by “looking” at a single gas molecule bouncing inside a box. Here, we designed an engine that stores energy by raising a bead against gravity, driven purely by information about the bead position. No work is done directly on the bead; instead, all dissipation occurs in the measuring apparatus. By choosing the right size of bead and through careful design, we improved information-engine performance by more than a factor of 10 over the best previous designs. We achieve a maximum velocity of 190 μm/s and maximum power of 103 kBT/s, numbers comparable to those measured in microorganisms.
The information engine designed by SFU researchers consists of a microscopic particle immersed in water and attached to a spring which, itself, is fixed to a movable stage.
Researchers then observe the particle bouncing up and down due to thermal motion.
“When we see an upward bounce, we move the stage up in response,” explains lead author and PhD student Tushar Saha. “When we see a downward bounce, we wait. This ends up lifting the entire system using only information about the particle’s position.”
Repeating this procedure, they raise the particle “a great height, and thus store a significant amount of gravitational energy,” without having to directly pull on the particle.
Saha further explains that, “in the lab, we implement this engine with an instrument known as an optical trap, which uses a laser to create a force on the particle that mimics that of the spring and stage.”
Joseph Lucero, a Master of Science student adds, “in our theoretical analysis, we find an interesting trade-off between the particle mass and the average time for the particle to bounce up. While heavier particles can store more gravitational energy, they generally also take longer to move up.”
“Guided by this insight, we picked the particle mass and other engine properties to maximize how fast the engine extracts energy, outperforming previous designs and achieving power comparable to molecular machinery in living cells, and speeds comparable to fast-swimming bacteria,” says postdoctoral fellow
Jannik Ehrich. University Communications, “World’s fastest information-fuelled engine designed by SFU researchers” at Simon Fraser University (May 11, 2021) The paper is closed access.
Hat tip: Philip Cunningham
“When we see the particle move up, we move the stage.”
In other words, WE are putting energy into the system. This is SILLY.
You can get a similar effect without the human input by rigging up an asymmetrical inertial driver on a surface with static friction. The inertial machine will overcome the static friction on its fast-push side, and stay in place on its slow-push side. This was the Dean Drive, which “walked” across a surface but wasn’t useful in open space.
An unbalanced top-loading washer is a Dean Drive.
Polistra states, “In other words, WE are putting energy into the system. This is SILLY.”
Yet the article itself states, “No work is done directly on the bead; instead, all dissipation occurs in the measuring apparatus.”
And via wikipedia on Szilard’s engine we find that, “In just the right circumstances therefore, the possession of a single bit of Shannon information,, really does correspond to a reduction in the entropy of the physical system. The global entropy is not decreased, but information to free energy conversion is possible.
Thus, contrary to what Polistra claimed, “WE are NOT putting energy into a system”, but “dissipation occurs in the measuring apparatus” outside the system. Whereas within the system, “information to energy conversion is performed”,,,
In the following article about the 2010 experiment, the experiment which wikipedia referenced, they state, “Scientists in Japan are the first to have succeeded in converting information into free energy,,, Until now, demonstrating the conversion of information to energy has been elusive,,, the team was able to measure precisely how much energy had been converted from information.”
As Christopher Jarzynski, who was instrumental in formulating the ‘equation to define the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit of information’, stated, “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,”
Thus, despite Polistra’s knee jerk reaction to label these experiments as “SILLY”, and therefore inconsequential, the implications of these experiments, as far as the physical reality of immaterial information is concerned, and as far as the debate between Darwinian evolution and Intelligent Design is concerned, are huge.
Darwinists, (and reductive materialists in general), have resolutely denied the independent physical reality of immaterial information, (which is separate from matter and energy).
Rolf Landauer himself held information to be physical, (i.e. to be reducible to matter and energy), because it always took energy to erase it from a computer. (Landauer’s principle)
In fact, Rolf Landauer went so far as to say that Roger Penrose’s contention that immaterial information has an existence independent of matter and energy was a quote unquote ‘quaint notion’.
Yet contrary to what Landauer and other reductive materialists may believe, there is much evidence that now establishes the physical reality of immaterial information which is independent of matter and energy.
As the following article entitled, “Scientists show how to erase information without using energy” stated, “Landauer said that information is physical because it takes energy to erase it. We are saying that the reason it (information) is physical has a broader context than that.”
The easiest way to demonstrate the physical reality of immaterial information, information which is independent of matter and energy, is with quantum teleportation.
And as the following 2009 article stated. “scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart,,, information,,, is transferred from one place to another, but without traveling through any physical medium.”
And as the following 2016 article stated, “the photons aren’t disappearing from one place and appearing in another. Instead, it’s the information that’s being teleported through quantum entanglement.,,, it is only the information that gets teleported from one place to another.”
Moreover, around 2016, the Maxwell demon thought experiment was extended, “to build “a tiny machine powered purely by information, which chilled metal through the power of its knowledge.”
And as the following 2016 article stated, “Running a brain-twisting thought experiment for real shows that information is a physical thing”,,
Moreover, the following 2017 article, (commenting on the fact that “a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year”) stated that: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,, quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,, Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
Again to repeat that last sentence, “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.,,,”
That statement is simply completely devastating to the materialistic claims of Darwinists who try to claim that immaterial information in life not the property of a immaterial mind and that immaterial information is not physically real but that the immaterial information in life is just a ‘metaphor’.
Moreover in 2018, “Physicists have experimentally demonstrated an information engine—a device that converts information into work—with an efficiency that exceeds the conventional second law of thermodynamics.”
And as the present article in the OP states, (via knowledge of a particle’s position), researchers built a Information engine that achieves “power comparable to molecular machinery in living cells, and speeds comparable to fast-swimming bacteria,”
HUH? “achieving power comparable to molecular machinery in living cells, and speeds comparable to fast-swimming bacteria,”,”???
That finding should literally make a Darwinian materialist’s head spin.
The molecular machines in life are, comparatively speaking, found to be far more efficient and powerful than any machine man has thus far intelligently designed. And now we find that these molecular machines are achieving this astonishing level of efficiency and power via information. i.e. They literally call the device they built an ‘information engine’!
Again, that finding should literally make a Darwinian materialist’s head spin.
A few years back, Darwinists right here on UD had previously tried to argue that life was not really based on information, (as ID advocates hold), but that life was really just based on ‘complicated chemistry’, and not on information, and that they could get along just as well without even using the word ‘information” at all.
Hubert P. Yockey himself, (who worked under Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project), had to defend against the Darwinian claim that the term ‘information’, as it is applied to life, is merely a “synonym, metaphor, or analogy.”
So these ‘beautiful’ experimental demonstrations showing that immaterial information has a “thermodynamic content’, (contrary to what Polistra implied), is not a minor development as far as the debate between Intelligent Design and Darwinian Evolution is concerned concerning the physical reality of immaterial information.
In short, although information is immaterial in its fundamental nature, and directly contrary to the materialistic claims of Darwinists, is still very much a physically real entity that has a very real, ‘thermodynamic’, effect on material particles!
Moreover, that immaterial information is now shown to have a very real ‘thermodynamic content’ now gives us an adequate explanation so as to be able to explain how life can possibly be so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium with its environment.
The information content that is found to be in a simple one cell bacterium, when working from the thermodynamic perspective, is found to be around 10 to the 12 bits,,,
,,, Which is the equivalent of about 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. ‘In comparison,,, the largest libraries in the world,, have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.”
Thus since Bacterial cells are about 10 times smaller than most plant and animal cells.
And since there are conservatively estimated to be around 30 trillion cells within the average human body,
Then that gives us a rough ballpark estimate of around 300 trillion times 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. Or about 300 trillion times the information content contained within the books of all the largest libraries in the world. Needless to say, that is a massive amount of ‘positional’ information that is somehow coming into a developing embryo from the outside by some non-material method.
And as the following article states, the information to build a human infant, atom by atom, would take up the equivalent of enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000.
So the question becomes, since information must be coming into a developing embryo from the outside by some ‘non-material’ method, in order to explain exactly why life is so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium, exactly where is this vast amount of ‘immaterial information’ coming from?
Well, Christian Theists just so happen to have postulated a source, and/or cause, for this vast amount of immaterial information that is coming into a developing embryo , ‘from the outside’, for thousands of years.
Well, the big problem I have with this is the use of the word “energy,” which is a word that reifies a model into a thing. “Energy,” like “gravity,” is a model of the behavior of phenomena given certain conditions. It refers to behaviors, or potential behaviors. A better semantic phrasing would be: the observation / collection / processing of information changes the behaviors of phenomena without any physical interaction.
Score another round for idealism reality theory.
The reification of behaviors and behavioral models into a “physical thing” called “energy” is pure materialist habit and obfuscation. No “energy” is being used or added to any system; the behaviors of the phenomena change according to models we label as “energy.”
The irony is that, as models of behavior, all “energy” can be in the first place is conceptual information about the behavior of phenomena.
@1 polistra
I literally thought the same thing
The researchers are the ones putting the energy into it
As to these claims in the OP:
To make their claims that they achieved, (via being “attached to a spring”), “power comparable to molecular machinery in living cells, and speeds comparable to fast-swimming bacteria” even stronger, the following study of the Bacterial Flagellum found that, when realizing that “the membranes (act) as a kind of springs connecting among those motA”, that the thermal noise caused by proton flux across the gradient was converted into energy that “is spent for circulating motions of motA-fliG.”
The authors of the preceding, (fairly impressive), study also claimed that “the physical principle of flagella motor does not belong to classical mechanics, but to quantum mechanics.”
And to make their claim that “the physical principle of flagella motor does not belong to classical mechanics, but to quantum mechanics” even stronger, the following study, which is subtitled ‘how bio-molecular machines can generate nontrivial quantum states’, the authors state that entanglement can be maintained even in the presence of very intense noise,
And in the following article, the authors of the preceding study even go on to state that ‘this reverses the previous orthodoxy, which held that quantum effects could not exist in biological systems because of the amount of noise in these systems’,,, Environmental noise here drives a persistent and cyclic generation of new entanglement.
Moreover, as the following article on photosynthesis stated, ‘ Certain biological systems living in low light environments have unique protein structures for photosynthesis that use quantum dynamics to convert 100% of absorbed light into electrical charge,,, These biological systems can direct a quantum process,,, in astoundingly subtle and controlled ways – showing remarkable resistance to the aggressive, random background noise of biology and extreme environments.’
In fact, besides quantum effects being present in bio-molecular machines and in photosynthesis, quantum effects are now also found to be ubiquitous within a wide range of important biomolecules.
In the following 2015 paper entitled, “Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules” it was found that “Most of the molecules taking part actively in biochemical processes are tuned exactly to the transition point and are critical conductors,” and the researchers further commented that “finding even one (biomolecule) that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,,
To drive this point home, this follow up 2018 article stated that “There is no obvious evolutionary reason why a protein should evolve toward a quantum-critical state, and there is no chance at all that the state could occur randomly.,,,”
Of related interest to the OP and also of related interest to the Bacterial Flagellum paper that I cited, the following study observed that quantum processes “concentrate all of the vibrational energy in a biological protein into its lowest-frequency vibrational mode.”
As well, DNA itself does not belong to the world of classical mechanics but instead belongs to the world of quantum mechanics. In the following video, at the 22:20 minute mark, Dr Rieper shows why the high temperatures of biological systems do not prevent DNA from having quantum entanglement, and then at 24:00 minute mark Dr Rieper goes on to remark that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it.
What is so devastating to Darwinian presuppositions with the finding pervasive quantum coherence, quantum entanglement, and/or quantum information, within molecular biology, is that quantum coherence, quantum entanglement, and/or quantum information is a non-local, beyond space and time, effect that requires a beyond space and time cause in order to explain its existence. As the following paper entitled “Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory” stated, “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”
Moreover, as the following study found, the greater the number of particles in a quantum hypergraph state, (which is exactly the type of quantum coherence that we have with protein and DNA molecules), the more strongly it violates local realism, with the strength increasing exponentially with the number of particles.
In short, the ‘problem’ of quantum non-locality is exponentially worse for Darwinian biologists than it originally was for physicist who were dealing with only two particles being entangled at a time.
Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, simply have no beyond space and time cause that they can appeal to so as to be able to explain the non-local quantum coherence and/or entanglement that is now found to be ubiquitous within biology. Whereas Christians readily do have a beyond space and time cause that they can appeal to so as to explain quantum entanglement. As Colossians 1:17 states, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
It is also important to realize that quantum information is conserved. As the following article states, “In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.”
The implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies. As Stuart Hameroff states in the following article, “the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Verse: