Kastner, Ruth and Schlatter, Andreas
(2023)
Entropy cost of "Erasure" in Physically Irreversible Processes.
[Preprint]
Abstract
A restricted form of Landauer’s Principle, independent of computational considerations, is shown to hold for thermal systems by reference to the joint entropy associated with conjugate observables. It is shown that the source of the compensating entropy for irreversible physical processes is due to the ontological uncertainty attending values of such mutually incompatible observables, rather than due to epistemic uncertainty as traditionally assumed in the information-theoretic approach. In particular, it is explicitly shown that erasure of logical (epistemic) information via reset operations is not equivalent to erasure of thermodynamic entropy, so that the traditional, information-theoretic form of Landauer's Principle is not supported by the physics. A further implication of the analysis is that there is no Maxwell's Demon in the real world.
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Entropy cost of "Erasure" in Physically Irreversible Processes. (deposited 06 Sep 2023 16:37)
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