· Entropy & Heat
Does Erasing Information Cost Energy? Landauer’s Principle (and the Debate Around It)
Deleting a file feels free, but physics says erasing information has a minimum cost. Landauer’s principle puts it at kT ln 2 per bit, about 2.9 × 10⁻²¹ joules at room temperature. Experiments with single trapped particles have measured heat close to this bound. Whether the principle is a fundamental law, and how to prove it in general, is still argued over.