On burning a lump of coal

Abstract

Burning something, (e.g. the proverbial lump of coal, or an encyclopaedia for that matter), in a blackbody furnace leads to an approximately Planck emission spectrum with an average entropy/information transfer of approximately $3.9\pm 2.5$ bits per emitted photon. This quantitative and qualitative result depends only on the underlying unitarity of the quantum physics of burning, combined with the statistical mechanics of blackbody radiation. The fact that the utterly standard and unitarity preserving process of burning something (in fact, burning anything) nevertheless *has* an associated entropy/information budget, and the quantitative *size* of that entropy/information budget, is a severely under-appreciated feature of standard quantum statistical physics.

11 pages

References in corpus (5)

• Measurement of stimulated Hawking emission in an analogue system
• Observation of self-amplifying Hawking radiation in an analog black hole laser
• Hawking-like radiation does not require a trapped region
• Thermality of the Hawking flux
• Free fall onto evaporating black holes at the quantum limit

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Generalized uncertainty principle impact onto the black holes information flux and the sparsity of Hawking radiation
• Black Holes: Eliminating Information or Illuminating New Physics?
• Rainbow gravity corrections to the information flux of a black hole and the sparsity of Hawking radiation
• Entropy/information flux in Hawking radiation
• Entropy budget for Hawking evaporation
• Coarse graining Shannon and von Neumann entropies
• On Black Hole Thermodynamics, Singularity, and Gravitational Entropy
• Multi-partite analysis of average-subsystem entropies
• Minimal length and the flow of entropy from black holes
• Decoding infrared imprints of quantum origins of black holes
• Analysis of the CERN-NA63 radiation reaction data set, assuming the Rindler bath is composed of microscopic black holes
• From mindless mathematics to thinking meat?
• Thermomagnetic Ettingshausen-Nernst effect in tachocline, magnetic reconnection phenomenon in lower layers, axion mechanism of solar luminosity variations, coronal heating problem solution and mechanism of ADM variations around BH