{
  "id": "1901.10290",
  "version": "v1",
  "published": "2019-01-29T13:57:36.000Z",
  "updated": "2019-01-29T13:57:36.000Z",
  "title": "The Free Energy of a General Computation",
  "authors": [
    "Ämin Baumeler",
    "Stefan Wolf"
  ],
  "comment": "5 pages, 1 figure",
  "categories": [
    "quant-ph"
  ],
  "abstract": "Starting from Landauer's slogan \"information is physical,\" we revise and modify Landauer's principle stating that the erasure of information has a minimal price in the form of a certain quantity of free energy. We establish a direct link between the erasure cost and the work value of a piece of information, and show that the former is essentially the length of the string's best compression by a reversible computation. We generalize the principle by deriving bounds on the free energy to be invested for -- or gained from, for that matter -- a general computation. We then revisit the second law of thermodynamics and compactly rephrase it (assuming the Church/Turing/Deutsch hypothesis that physical reality can be simulated by a universal Turing machine): Time evolutions are logically reversible -- \"the future fully remembers the past (but not necessarily vice versa).\" We link this view to previous formulations of the second law, and we argue that it has a particular feature that suggests its \"logico-informational\" nature, namely simulation resilience: If a computation faithfully simulates a physical process violating the law -- then that very computation procedure violates it as well.",
  "revisions": [
    {
      "version": "v1",
      "updated": "2019-01-29T13:57:36.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "analyses": {
    "keywords": [
      "free energy",
      "general computation",
      "second law",
      "strings best compression",
      "computation procedure violates"
    ],
    "note": {
      "typesetting": "TeX",
      "pages": 5,
      "language": "en",
      "license": "arXiv",
      "status": "editable"
    }
  }
}