Excerpt

Léo Szilárd made important contributions to the foundations of statistical thermodynamics and the physics of information with work he completed in 1922. This appeared in print much later (Szilárd 1925, 1929), and was not translated into English until 1972 and 1964, respectively. The second paper (Szilárd 1929), reprinted in this chapter, provides a physical basis for quantifying information. This groundbreaking work was not immediately fully absorbed into the developing literature on information theory, cybernetics, and physics of computation; its recognition came with some delay. The paper has had a recent revival, recognized as the founding paper on information engines.

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