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Tiiba comments on The Popularization Bias - Less Wrong
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Comments (53)
Regarding this discussion, I'm totally confused what people are talking about. It sounds like you want to take some of your excess energy and throw it into a black hole. Wouldn't it be smarter to give it to me? How can energy be "excess"?
Eliezer has a post that explains some of the background assumed here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/o5/the_second_law_of_thermodynamics_and_engines_of/.
I have just finished reading this article. I still have no idea what it is that you intend to do with the black hole, or why it's useful. Seriously, not even an inkling. And I seem to be unique in this regard, which sucks.
The only way that I can think of for a black hole to reduce entropy is if you throw things into it. Give them to me.
Tilba, Wei's earlier post pointed to this article:
http://weidai.com/black-holes.txt
You might also need to know that computation can be done in principle almost without expending energy, and the colder you do the computation, the less energy is wasted. Hence being cold is a good thing, and black holes are very cold.
I didn't get it right away, but now that I do, it's pretty ingenious. Let me see if I got it right. Build a big ball in space. If the ball was empty, starlight and cosmic background would heat it up, the inner surface would emit photons, and they would bounce around the shell - so you're back to square one. But the black hole at the center can absorb those photons without becoming hot. And the photons are unusable because they are ambient.
On the other hand, there is now a temperature difference between the inside and the outside. Can it be used to make usable energy?
Not energy, entropy. Energy is useful - entropy is useless.