Are concepts of heat and efficiency applicable to atom-size machines or nanoelectronics components? Can we rebuild thermodynamics from laws quantum mechanics?

Thermodynamics developed before the atomic nature of of matter was understood. Major developments occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century. The names Carnot, Clausius, W. Thompson (Kelvin) are major names associated with these developments. Tsallis is a notable current worker in this field. Thermodynamics is based on a small number of basic principles (the laws of thermodynamics.) T...

The laws of thermodynamics, powerful for countless purposes, are not exact: both their phenomenological and their statistical-mechanical versions are valid only at ‘macroscopic scales’, which are never defined. Here I propose a new, exact and scale-independent formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, using the principles and tools of the recently proposed constructor theory. ...

The connection between brain and mind is an important scientific and philosophical question that we are still far from completely understanding. A crucial point to our work is noticing that thermodynamics provides a convenient framework to model brain activity, whereas cognition can be modeled in information-theoretical terms. In fact, several models have been proposed so far from both approach...