Have you ever thought about what happens to all the information you delete from your computer’s hard drive? You might be surprised to discover that deleted files aren’t actually erased. Even when you delete a file from your computer’s trash folder, your computer holds onto the file while erasing the file name and its listing in any directories. The file itself remains on your hard drive, functionally irretrievable (without special software) until it is overwritten when the hard drive needs that data space. At that point, your data is actually irretrievable. That portion of the hard drive’s disk space has…
Comments closedTag: Quantum Physics
In last week’s post on entropy, I blithely referred to black holes as spontaneously increasing in entropy. This may seem counterintuitive (as much as anybody can have “intuition” about black holes). If we view the increase in entropy as a system moving from order to disorder, how would a singularity become more disordered? How could the contents of a black hole spread out in a more disordered manner if they are supposed to take up an infinitely small amount of space? If we use the other definition of entropy, the dispersal of energy, then that would imply that a black…
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