Rolf Landauer

Landauer Rolf. Electrical conductivity in inhomogeneous media. American Institute of Physics Conference Proceedings Electrical Transport and Optical Properties of Inhomogeneous Media. 40 (1977) 2-45. 

The quote is attributed to Rolf Landauer by Mehra ([mehra94], page 540) as part of a remark Landauer made about Feynman s participation at the 1981 MIT Conference. Landauer was referring to Feynman s interest in ferreting out the connections between quantum mechanics and computation, but his sentiment could equally well be extended to encompass Feynman s deep interest in fundamental physics. 

Rolf Landauer proved that the minimum resistance of any single-channel wire (composed of atoms or molecules or polymers), measured between any two macroscopic electrodes, is the quantum of resistance R = (h/2e ) = 12.91 kQ, where h is Planck s constant, and e is the electronic charge. In Milestone Two, this Landauer quantum of resistance was measured by Walt de Heer and coworkers at room temperature between a multiple-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT), glued to a conducting AFM tip, and a pool of liquid... 

Landauer s principle The principle put forward by Rolf Landauer in the 1960s that energy has to be expended to erase information. This principle links thermodynamics and information theory. 

In 1961 Rolf Landauer [17], studying the thermodynamics of computational processes, discovered that the action of erasing one bit of information has an energy cost of at least ksTbil, and increases the entropy of the environment by an amount of at least feBln2. Computation does not cost energy, but erasure does. 

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