Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by im3w1l 2171 days ago
You have a common misunderstanding. Heat contains a lot of information. Chemical energy contains almost none. That's a problem because you can't destroy information, so you can't go back to (much more useful) chemical energy.

But if you have "illusory heat" that seems to contain a lot of information, but it's actually just a tiny amount of information (say 128 bit) that has been used stretched into a lot (say 1gig), then with the right key you can see that it actually is not a lot of information. And then you should, in theory, be able to go back to chemical energy.