While Rolf Landauer was working at IBM in the early 1960s, he had a startling insight about how heat, entropy, and information were connected. Landauer realized that manipulating information releases heat and increases entropy, or the disorder of the environment. He used this to calculate a theoretical lower limit for heat released from a computation, such as erasing a bit. At room temperature, the limit is about 10-21, or one billionth of a trillionth of a joule. (A joule is about the energy re...
While Rolf Landauer was working at IBM in the early 1960s, he had a startling insight about how heat, entropy, and information were connected. Landauer realized that manipulating information releases heat and increases entropy, or the disorder of the environment. He used this to calculate a theoretical lower limit for heat released from a computation, such as erasing a bit. At room temperature, the limit is about 10-21, or one billionth of a trillionth of a joule. (A joule is about the energy re...
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