Limits, applicability and generalizations of the Landauer's erasure principle

Almost sixty years since Landauer linked the erasure of information with an increase of entropy, his famous erasure principle and byproducts like reversible computing are still subjected to debates in the scientific community. In this work we use the Liouville theorem to establish three different types of the relation between manipulation of information by a logical gate and the change of its physical entropy, corresponding to three types of the final state of environment. A time-reversible relation can be established when the final states of environment corresponding to different logical inputs are macroscopically distinguishable, showing a path to reversible computation and erasure of data with no entropy cost. A weak relation, giving the entropy change of $k \ln 2$ for an erasure gate, can be deduced without any thermodynamical argument, only requiring the final states of environment to be macroscopically indistinguishable. The common strong relation that links entropy cost to heat requires the final states of environment to be in a thermal equilibrium. We argue in this work that much of the misunderstanding around the Landauer's erasure principle stems from not properly distinguishing the limits and applicability of these three different relations. Due to new technological advances, we emphasize the importance of taking into account the time-reversible and weak types of relation to link the information manipulation and entropy cost in erasure gates beyond the considerations of environments in thermodynamic equilibrium.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figure

Can the wave function in configuration space be replaced by single-particle wave functions in physical space?

The ontology of Bohmian mechanics includes both the universal wave function (living in 3N-dimensional configuration space) and particles (living in ordinary 3-dimensional physical space). Proposals for understanding the physical significance of the wave function in this theory have included the idea of regarding it as a physically-real field in its 3N-dimensional space, as well as the idea of regarding it as a law of nature. Here we introduce and explore a third possibility in which the configuration space wave function is simply eliminated -- replaced by a set of single-particle pilot-wave fields living in ordinary physical space. Such a re-formulation of the Bohmian pilot-wave theory can exactly reproduce the statistical predictions of ordinary quantum theory. But this comes at the rather high ontological price of introducing an infinite network of interacting potential fields (living in 3-dimensional space) which influence the particles' motion through the pilot-wave fields. We thus introduce an alternative approach which aims at achieving empirical adequacy (like that enjoyed by GRW type theories) with a more modest ontological complexity, and provide some preliminary evidence for optimism regarding the (once popular but prematurely-abandoned) program of trying to replace the (philosophically puzzling) configuration space wave function with a (totally unproblematic) set of fields in ordinary physical space.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Synthese Special Issue: Space-time and the wave functio

Dynamics of Current, Charge and Mass

Electricity plays a special role in our lives and life. Equations of electron dynamics are nearly exact and apply from nuclear particles to stars. These Maxwell equations include a special term the displacement current (of vacuum). Displacement current allows electrical signals to propagate through space. Displacement current guarantees that current is exactly conserved from inside atoms to between stars, as long as current is defined as Maxwell did, as the entire source of the curl of the magnetic field. We show how the Bohm formulation of quantum mechanics allows easy definition of current. We show how conservation of current can be derived without mention of the polarization or dielectric properties of matter. Matter does not behave the way physicists of the 1800's thought it does with a single dielectric constant, a real positive number independent of everything. Charge moves in enormously complicated ways that cannot be described in that way, when studied on time scales important today for electronic technology and molecular biology. Life occurs in ionic solutions in which charge moves in response to forces not mentioned or described in the Maxwell equations, like convection and diffusion. Classical derivations of conservation of current involve classical treatments of dielectrics and polarization in nearly every textbook. Because real dielectrics do not behave in a classical way, classical derivations of conservation of current are often distrusted or even ignored. We show that current is conserved exactly in any material no matter how complex the dielectric, polarization or conduction currents are. We believe models, simulations, and computations should conserve current on all scales, as accurately as possible, because physics conserves current that way. We believe models will be much more successful if they conserve current at every level of resolution, the way physics does.Comment: Version 4 slight reformattin