Related papers: Information is not physical
In this paper, we analyze the relationship between entropy and information in the context of the mixing process of two identical ideal gases. We will argue that entropy has a special information-based feature that is enfolded in the…
The association of information with entropy has been argued on plausibility arguments involving the operation of imaginary engines and beings, and it is not a universal theorem. In this paper, a theorem by Charles Bennett on reversible…
The frequent misunderstanding of information entropy is pointed out. It is shown that, contrary to fortuitous situations and common beliefs, there is no general interrelation between the information entropy and the thermodynamical entropy.…
The second law of thermodynamics is probabilistic in nature. Its formulation requires that the state of a system be described by a probability distribution. A natural question, thereby, arises as to whether a prior knowledge about the state…
Landauer's "principle" claims that erasing one bit of information necessarily dissipates at least Tln2 of heat into the surroundings, making a possibly logically irreversible operation also thermodynamically irreversible. It is commonly…
Landauer erasure seems to provide a powerful link between thermodynamics and information processing (logical computation). The only logical operations that require a generation of heat are logically irreversible ones, with the minimum heat…
Even though the second law of thermodynamics holds the supreme position among the laws of nature, as stated by many distinguished scientists, notably Eddington and Einstein, its position appears to be also quite peculiar. Given the atomic…
We focus attention on some particular thermodynamic relations (PTR). Using information theory concepts we show that, for a reversible process, microscopic considerations related to these PTR make the concomitant informational contents of…
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…
Second law of thermodynamics can be apparently violated for systems whose dynamics depends on acquired information by measurement. However, when one consider measurement and erasure process together along with the system it saves the second…
Energy has no definition, except that given by a conservation principle which essentially amounts to defining it as the elements of an open list of unknown cardinality. Entropy, identified by Shannon as information we lack, has too many…
This article discusses the concept of information and its intimate relationship with physics. After an introduction of all the necessary quantum mechanical and information theoretical concepts we analyze Landauer's principle that states…
Landauer's erasure principle exposes an intrinsic relation between thermodynamics and information theory: the erasure of information stored in a system, S, requires an amount of work proportional to the entropy of that system. This entropy,…
In this study, we present a reformulation of classical equilibrium thermodynamics by replacing the obscure and ambiguous concept of entropy with the clear and intuitive concept of information stored in a thermodynamic system. Specifically,…
Connections between information theory and thermodynamics have proven to be very useful to establish bounding limits for physical processes. Ideas such as Landauer's erasure principle and information assisted work extraction have greatly…
We study the informational underpinnings of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, using an abstract framework, general probabilistic theories, capable of describing arbitrary physical theories. This allows one to abstract the…
We look at certain thought experiments based upon the 'delayed choice' and 'quantum eraser' interference experiments, which present a complementarity between information gathered from a quantum measurement and interference effects. It has…
A communication theory for a transmitter broadcasting to many receivers is presented. In this case energetic considerations cannot be neglected as in Shannon theory. It is shown that, when energy is assigned to the information bit,…
In a classic thought experiment, Szilard suggested a heat engine where a single particle, for example an atom or a molecule, is confined in a container coupled to a single heat bath. The container can be separated into two parts by a…
The link between information and energy introduces the observer and their knowledge into the understanding of a fundamental quantity of physics. Two approaches compete to account for this link, Brillouin's negentropy law of information and…