Some Ideas of James Watt in Contemporary Energy Conversion Thermodynamics

James Watt contributed significantly to the development of the thermodynamics of energy conversion as a science. Several of his ideas are now integral part of thermodynamics, but Watt as their creator is not mentioned. This paper presents some of Watt’s concepts of energy conversion, including his thermodynamic analysis of the Newcomen steam engine that marks the beginning of thermal engineering. The analysis illuminated the causes of the enormously high heat losses in the installation and showed the ways for their reduction. This led him to a new conception of the steam engine with a separate condenser. Not less important was Watt’s determination of some physical properties of water and steam used as the working substance. In the experiments he observed the decrease of the latent heat of steam with increasing temperature and its disappearance at very high temperature led him to postulate the existence of a thermodynamic critical state of water. He introduced the work associated with volume change into thermodynamics and illustrated it graphically. Several of Watt’s numerous ideas deserve to be included into the history of the thermodynamics of energy conversion but they are rarely mentioned in the scientific literature. Arguably the most important is the First Law of Thermodynamics, which he introduced in his 1769 patent and related works in 1774 and 1778.

Relating Maxwell's demon and quantitative analysis of information leakage for practical imperative programs

Shannon observed the relation between information entropy and Maxwell demon experiment to come up with information entropy formula. After that, Shannon＇s entropy formula is widely used to measure information leakage in imperative programs. But in the present work, our aim is to go in a reverse direction and try to find possible Maxwell＇s demon experimental setup for contemporary practical imperative programs in which variations of Shannon＇s entropy formula has been applied to measure the information leakage. To establish the relation between the second principle of thermodynamics and quantitative analysis of information leakage, present work models contemporary variations of imperative programs in terms of Maxwell＇s demon experimental setup. In the present work five contemporary variations of imperative program related to information quantification are identified. They are： （i） information leakage in imperative program, （ii） imperative multi- threaded program, （iii） point to point leakage in the imperative program, （iv） imperative program with infinite observation, and （v） imperative program in the SOA-based environment. For these variations, minimal work required by an attacker to gain the secret is also calculated using historical Maxwell＇s demon experiment. To model the experimental setup of Maxwell＇s demon, non-interference security policy is used. In the present work, imperative programs with one-bit secret information have been considered to avoid the complexity. The findings of the present work from the history of physics can be utilized in many areas related to information flow of physical computing, nano-computing, quantum computing, biological computing, energy dissipation in computing, and computing power analysis.