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LIT-360: Notes on Landauer's principle, reversible computation, and Maxwell's Demon

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Properties5
StatusActive — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-310); Worth reading as a short, first-hand statement, by the principle's main defender, of what Landauer's principle requires (logical irreversibility) and what it does not (any cost for acquiring, copying or evaluating information). It is the best reachable stand-in for the unreachable LIT-328. Read it knowing that it is an argued position paper, not a derivation. On the Earman–Norton "unnecessary or insufficient" dilemma Bennett concedes the point "with some justice" (p. 5) and defends the principle only as pedagogy.
Version2
Tagsinformation-theory, thermodynamics, natural-sciences, philosophy-of-science
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-310 — Notes on Landauer's principle, reversible computation, and Maxwell's Demon
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-030 — For a memory evolving reversibly with its environment, Landauer's bound prices only steps that lose logical distinguishability, at least k ln 2 of entropy per bit lost, exported to the environment and not necessarily as heat, so copying onto a blank register, measuring or evaluating a bit has no minimum cost; learning a label has a floor only in total entropy production, at least the information learnt, which in Goldt and Seifert's perceptron can be paid in the weights' own entropy with vanishing heat

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Bennett (2002), Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B (Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics) 34(3):501–510, September 2003 (Crossref-verified); arXiv v1 1 Oct 2002, v2 9 Jan 2003 (physics.class-ph) — arXiv:physics/0210005

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-09-29 as a supplemental reading. The close readings of the owner’s prior-art novelty map’s references found the map’s citation for this point wrong, or its source unreachable, and this work is the candidate replacement. published: is the first appearance (ADR-002).

It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-310 is the close reading of 2026-09-29, and it placed the work: Active — Worth reading as a short, first-hand statement, by the principle’s main defender, of what Landauer’s principle requires (logical irreversibility) and what it does not (any cost for acquiring, copying or evaluating information). It is the best reachable stand-in for the unreachable LIT-328. Read it knowing that it is an argued position paper, not a derivation. On the Earman–Norton “unnecessary or insufficient” dilemma Bennett concedes the point “with some justice” (p. 5) and defends the principle only as pedagogy.

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