Criticality ...

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The 1st law of thermodynamics rules as it's all about energy as said entity can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed. i.e.The flow of heat is a form of energy transfer. Heating is the natural process of moving energy to or from a system other than by work or the transfer of matter. With this being said, excess heat generated from thermodynamic processes to include erasing bits, is a killer for computers as well as being bad for the environment, a problem needing a solution now.

In case you had not noticed, computers are hot—literally. A laptop can pump out thigh-baking heat, while data centers consume an estimated 200 terawatt-hours each year—comparable to the energy consumption of some medium-sized countries. The carbon footprint of information and communication technologies as a whole is close to that of fuel use in the aviation industry. And as computer circuitry gets ever smaller and more densely packed, it becomes more prone to melting from the energy it dissipates as heat.

 Entropy also rules.

In 1961 physicist Rolf Landauer of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., showed that conventional computing incurs an unavoidable cost in energy dissipation—basically, in the generation of heat and entropy. That is because a conventional computer has to sometimes erase bits of information in its memory circuits in order to make space for more. Each time a single bit (with the value 1 or 0) is reset, a certain minimum amount of energy is dissipated—which Ray and Crutchfield have christened “the Landauer.” Its value depends on ambient temperature: in your living room, one Landauer would be around 10–21 joule. (For comparison, a lit candle emits on the order of 10 joules of energy per second.)

Is there a way out as the faster machines get, the hotter they get.

Possibly ...

Harnessing a particle’s velocity for computing is not an entirely new idea. Momentum computing is closely analogous to a reversible-computing concept called ballistic computing that was proposed in the 1980s: in it, information is encoded in objects or particles that move freely through the circuits under their own inertia, carrying with them some signal that is used repeatedly to enact many logical operations. If the particle interacts elastically with others, it will not lose any energy in the process. In such a device, once the ballistic bits have been “launched,” they alone power the computation without any other energy input. The computation is reversible as long as the bits continue bouncing along their trajectories. Information is only erased, and energy is only dissipated, when their states are read out.

Whereas, in ballistic computing, a particle’s velocity simply transports it through the device, allowing the particle to ferry information from input to output, Crutchfield says, in momentum computing, a particle’s velocity and position collectively allow it to embody a unique and unambiguous sequence of states during a computation. This latter circumstance is the key to reversibility and thus low dissipation, he adds, because it can reveal exactly where each particle has been.

It's all about reading out particle states using quantum computing in real time, to lessen the heat equation. Unfortunately, QC's a tech far from being practical in the year of our lord 2022 in addition to the impact Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle may have on any given computation.

To be continued.

The 3rd Law: A system's entropy approaches a constant value as its temperature approaches absolute zero.

a) Single possible configuration for a system at absolute zero, i.e., only one microstate is accessible. b) At temperatures greater than absolute zero, multiple microstates are accessible due to atomic vibration (exaggerated in the figure)