Equation 6 · 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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It is worth being explicit about what remained unverified in 1961: Landauer’s paper was a theoretical argument grounded in general reasoning about bistable physical systems, not a measurement. No experiment existed, or could have existed with 1961-era instrumentation, capable of resolving a T2 heat signature from a single erased bit — that quantity, at room temperature, is on the order of 10^{-21} joules, far below the noise floor of any calorimetry available at the time. The principle stood as an unconfirmed but increasingly trusted theoretical result for more than fifty years.
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