Strongly upvoted for taking the effort to sum up the debate between these two.
Just a brief comment from me, this part:
If we scale down by a factor of 2, the power consumption is halved (since every wire is half as long), the area is quartered (so power density over the surface is doubled), and the temperature gradient is doubled since the surface is half as thick.
Only makes sense in the context of a specified temperature range and wire material. I’m not sure if it was specified elsewhere or not.
A trivial example, A superconducting wire at 50 K will certainly not have it’s power consumption halved by scaling down a factor of 2, since it’s consumption is already practically zero (though not perfectly zero).
Strongly upvoted for taking the effort to sum up the debate between these two.
Just a brief comment from me, this part:
Only makes sense in the context of a specified temperature range and wire material. I’m not sure if it was specified elsewhere or not.
A trivial example, A superconducting wire at 50 K will certainly not have it’s power consumption halved by scaling down a factor of 2, since it’s consumption is already practically zero (though not perfectly zero).
This is all assuming that the power consumption for a wire is at-or-near the Landauer-based limit Jacob argued in his post.