Noise is the enemy of many computing paradigms. Conventional computers are power hungry because they must operate at energy levels well above those of electronic fluctuations in silicon. The problem is much more acute in quantum computing, where noise is a significant barrier to creating practical processors.

But what if we could use noise as a computational resource? That is the idea behind thermodynamic computing – which is the focus of this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast. My guest is the theoretical physicist Stephen Whitelam – who joins me down the line from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US.