Shakin’ All Over: Proving Landauer’s Principle without Neglect of Fluctuations

Abstract

Landauer's principle is, roughly, the principle that logically irreversible operations cannot be performed without dissipation of energy, with a specified lower bound on that dissipation. Though widely accepted in the literature on the thermodynamics of computation, it has been the subject of considerable dispute in the philosophical literature. Proofs of the principle have been questioned on the grounds of insufficient generality and on the grounds of the assumption, used in the proofs, of the availability of reversible processes at the microscale. The relevance of the principle, should it be true, has also been questioned, as it has been argued that microscale fluctuations entail dissipation that always greatly exceeds the Landauer bound. In this article Landauer's principle is treated within statistical mechanics, and a proof of the principle is given that neither relies on neglect of fluctuations nor assumes the availability of thermodynamically reversible processes. In addition, it is argued that microscale fluctuations are no obstacle to approximating thermodynamic reversibility, in the appropriate sense, as closely as one would like.