标题： 燃烧一块煤 显示英文标题

标题： On burning a lump of coal

摘要： 在黑体炉中燃烧某物（例如，谚语中的煤块，或者更一般地说，一部百科全书），会导致大约为普朗克发射光谱的平均熵/信息传递量约为$3.9 \pm 2.5$比特每发射的光子。 这个定量和定性结果仅依赖于燃烧的量子物理的底层幺正性，以及黑体辐射的统计力学。 燃烧某物（事实上，燃烧任何东西）这一完全标准且保持幺正性的过程却*具有*相关的熵/信息预算，以及该熵/信息预算的定量*大小*，这是标准量子统计物理中被严重低估的一个特性。 显示英文摘要

摘要： Burning something, (e.g. the proverbial lump of coal, or an encyclopaedia for that matter), in a blackbody furnace leads to an approximately Planck emission spectrum with an average entropy/information transfer of approximately $3.9 \pm 2.5$ bits per emitted photon. This quantitative and qualitative result depends only on the underlying unitarity of the quantum physics of burning, combined with the statistical mechanics of blackbody radiation. The fact that the utterly standard and unitarity preserving process of burning something (in fact, burning anything) nevertheless *has* an associated entropy/information budget, and the quantitative *size* of that entropy/information budget, is a severely under-appreciated feature of standard quantum statistical physics.