Experiments · The Celestial Code

What it costs to erase a bit

Landauer’s limit: kT ln 2 for every erased bit, where k is Boltzmann’s constant and T the temperature of the surroundings. Bérut and colleagues measured it in 2012 with a single glass bead in a double laser trap.

Where this comes from

The Celestial Code · Chapter 3

A Photo Costs Energy

In 1937, a twenty-year-old Claude Shannon defended a master’s thesis later called “possibly the most important master’s thesis in history.” He proved something engineers shrugged at first — and then built digital civilization on. The gist: an electrical switch is a “yes” or a “no.”…

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More experiments

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