Equation 5 · From Origins to Frontier: A History of Stochastic Thermodynamics and Complex Systems
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Symbol k_B
is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Symbol T
T is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
subscript
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The decisive correction came from Rolf Landauer at IBM in 1961, in “Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process,” published in the IBM Journal of Research and Development [ 2 ] . Landauer was not working on Maxwell’s demon directly — his subject was the physical limits of computation, motivated by IBM’s practical interest in how much heat a computing device must dissipate. His central claim, now called Landauer’s principle, was that logically irreversible operations — operations that map two or more distinct input states onto the same output state, of which erasing a bit of memory is the paradigm case — must dissipate at least T 2 of heat into the environment per bit…
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The decisive correction came from Rolf Landauer at IBM in 1961, in “Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process,” published in the IBM Journal of Research and Development [ 2 ] . Landauer was not working on Maxwell’s demon directly — his subject was the physical limits of computation, motivated by IBM’s practical interest in how much heat a computing device must dissipate. His central claim, now called Landauer’s principle, was that logically irreversible operations — operations that map two or more distinct input states onto the same output state, of which erasing a bit of memory is the paradigm case — must dissipate at least T 2 of heat into the environment per bit erased, regardless of how the erasure is physically implemented. Logically reversible operations, by contrast, carry no such lower bound.
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