I really enjoyed your take on TGNA — it’s rare to see someone seriously exploring heat as a computational medium.
One thing I kept thinking about while reading was memory.
In our current systems, memory is basically electron choreography — moving them, trapping them, or keeping them in a loop. That works brilliantly for speed, but it’s fragile and power-hungry. What’s interesting about heat is its natural persistence. A thermal gradient can linger in a material long after the initial pulse, especially if the geometry and conductivity are tuned for it.
If we treat those lingering temperature profiles as a form of embodied memory, we could get something that behaves less like a digital snapshot and more like a biological memory trace. Imagine a thermal layer that remembers the “shape” of past computations — not just storing bits, but encoding experience in its conductivity map. In a hybrid photonic–thermal system, the photonics could handle fast symbolic work, while the thermal layer slowly integrates and retains context, almost like long-term potentiation in a brain.
That could mean:
• Memory that self-stabilises without refresh cycles.
• Context-sensitive recall, because environment shifts would literally shape the memory state.
• Security benefits — the memory would be inseparable from the exact physical state of the hardware.
And in that sense, you’re absolutely right — the most accurate model of such a system might be the system itself. I think heat could give us a new kind of “living” memory architecture, where storage and computation happen in the same evolving physical substrate.
I’m really glad you enjoyed it! and I love the way you’ve framed memory here. The idea of a lingering thermal profile acting like a biological trace just clicks. It’s such a shift from chasing perfect stability to letting the “imperfections” become part of the memory itself. A hybrid system like that could feel less like cold storage and more like something alive, carrying the imprint of its own history.
I really enjoyed your take on TGNA — it’s rare to see someone seriously exploring heat as a computational medium.
One thing I kept thinking about while reading was memory.
In our current systems, memory is basically electron choreography — moving them, trapping them, or keeping them in a loop. That works brilliantly for speed, but it’s fragile and power-hungry. What’s interesting about heat is its natural persistence. A thermal gradient can linger in a material long after the initial pulse, especially if the geometry and conductivity are tuned for it.
If we treat those lingering temperature profiles as a form of embodied memory, we could get something that behaves less like a digital snapshot and more like a biological memory trace. Imagine a thermal layer that remembers the “shape” of past computations — not just storing bits, but encoding experience in its conductivity map. In a hybrid photonic–thermal system, the photonics could handle fast symbolic work, while the thermal layer slowly integrates and retains context, almost like long-term potentiation in a brain.
That could mean:
• Memory that self-stabilises without refresh cycles.
• Context-sensitive recall, because environment shifts would literally shape the memory state.
• Security benefits — the memory would be inseparable from the exact physical state of the hardware.
And in that sense, you’re absolutely right — the most accurate model of such a system might be the system itself. I think heat could give us a new kind of “living” memory architecture, where storage and computation happen in the same evolving physical substrate.
I’m really glad you enjoyed it! and I love the way you’ve framed memory here. The idea of a lingering thermal profile acting like a biological trace just clicks. It’s such a shift from chasing perfect stability to letting the “imperfections” become part of the memory itself. A hybrid system like that could feel less like cold storage and more like something alive, carrying the imprint of its own history.