Thermodynamics of Computation

This site provides a good, fairly accessable introduction to the thermodynamics of computation with links to other sources.

(Disclaimer: if you go to the about page, you'll find out why I know about this. And also why another of us may find this familiar..)

Posts on chapter 6 to read

I just put a couple of posts on condensed concepts.
sorry, I wont be at the tuesday meeting.
Hopefully, I will see lots of other posts before then.

Key concepts in thermodynamics

As much as I love Nelson's book I prefer to approach teaching thermodynamics and particularly entropy without introducing microscopic notions such as ensembles, probability etc.
The first ten of these slides I use in PHYS2020 to give a succinct view of the key concepts in thermodynamics. Here entropy is a macroscopic concept associated with irreversibility.

The second law of thermodynamics

For an adiabatically isolated system the entropy of the system can
never decrease.

But, a more practically useful form of the second law is:

for a system in equilibrium with an environment at a given temperature and pressure the Gibbs free energy, G = U + PV-T S, can never increase.

Consequently, in the equilibrium state of any system (whether a folded protein or a superconductor) the Gibbs free energy must be a minimum.

Never forget this! This is the most important idea in all of thermodynamics!