paper · Rolf Landauer / Charles Bennett · tradition:
information-theory
Landauer (1961) established that erasing one bit of information carries an unavoidable thermodynamic cost of at least kT ln 2; Bennett (1982) used this to dissolve Maxwell’s demon, showing the demon’s apparent free order is paid back when it erases its memory. Grounds the book’s ‘a choice is a cost too’ correction: aiming is never free, and the real split is blind cost vs. criterial cost.
The book’s stance. evidentiary grounding for the cost/choice asymmetry in Chapter 5b.
Availability. Cited by reference; no local copy held in the repo.