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How Did We Get Here? The Tangled History of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Stephen Wolfram

But in 1798 Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) (1753–1814) measured the heat produced by the mechanical process of boring a cannon, and began to make the argument that, in contradiction to the caloric theory, there was actually some kind of correspondence between mechanical energy and amount of heat.

Energy 88
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A 50-Year Quest: My Personal Journey with the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Stephen Wolfram

In July I was making “encryption-friendly” pictures of rule 30: But what Jack and I were most interested in was doing something more “cryptographically sophisticated”, and in particular inventing a practical public-key cryptosystem based on cellular automata. And it’s basically still not been figured out (and maybe it’s actually impossible).

Physics 95