Foundational Papers in Complexity Science pp. 483–511
DOI: 10.37911/9781947864528.16
The Relationship between Physics and Computation: The Minimal Thermodynamic Cost of to Erase a Bit
Author: David H. Wolpert, Santa Fe Institute
Excerpt
The question of how the foundations of physics are related to information processing, to what we now call “computation,” is an extremely deep issue that has concerned scientists for centuries. Indeed, some researchers, like John Wheeler (2002) with his pithy phrase “it from bit,” saw this question as one of the central open issues in the entire scientific enterprise.
Perhaps the greatest success we have had in grappling with this question is when it is restricted to concern the relationship between information processing and statistical physics, specifically. Research into this relationship can be traced all the way back to the nineteenth century, with Maxwell’s demon, a thought experiment that concerned whether an “intelligent demon” could exploit observational data to circumvent the second law of thermodynamics. Important subsequent work into this relationship was done in the early twentieth century by Brillouin, Szilárd, and others.
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