This article is so weird.
The notion that it’s a secret is a strange premise. I realize of course they’re being cute. But you can say any new scientific insight that has an associated theoretical technique is a “secret”, so that’s not a differentiated way to headline a discovery.
The article itself I can follow because I know the field, but it’s kind of muddled.
There are tons of people who know about this stuff and can explain it well. Why do premier journalism brands allow crap on their web properties?
Given Landauer's principle, one would expect it takes only a finite amount of energy to erase information in a physical system.
And given an information-theoretic understanding of thermodynamics, a system at absolute zero has no history about prior states. It’s the null state of matter without any quantum information accumulated through interactions.
This suggests that taking a system down to absolute zero from a higher state should take only a finite amount of energy.
Which seems counterintuitive, or “paradoxical”, given the classical understanding of thermodynamics.
So what’s the resolution?
It’s an interesting problem and one I regret not having quite forged all the way myself. I poked around at the edge in stuff I looking into with Wheeler and Jarrett in the 1980s and 1990s.
I didn’t read the paper yet but I think I see where it has to go, and it’s kinda cool. I do think maybe it was already covered, perhaps by Seth Lloyd, but I’ll have to look.