Landauer's principle  Landauer's principle is a physical principle pertaining to the lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation. It holds that "any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information-bearing degrees of freedom of the information-processing apparatus or its environment". Another way of phrasing Landauer's principle is that if an observer loses information about a physical system, the observer loses the ability to extract work from that system. A so-called logically-reversible computation, in which no information is erased, may in principle be carried out without releasing any heat. This has led to considerable interest in the study of reversible computing. Indeed, without reversible computing, increases in the number of computations-per-joule-of-energy-dissipated must come to a halt by about 2050: because the limit implied by Landauer's principle will be reached by then, according to Koomey's law. At 20 °C (room temperature, or 293.15 K), the Landauer limit represents an energy of approximately 0.0175 eV, or 2.805 zJ. Theoretically, roomtemperature computer memory operating at the Landauer limit could be changed at a rate of one billion bits per second (1Gbps) with energy being converted to heat in the memory media at the rate of only 2.805 trillionths of a watt (that is, at a rate of only 2.805 pJ/s). Modern computers use millions of times as much energy per second. Rolf Landauer first proposed the principle in 1961 while working at IBM. He justified and stated important limits to an earlier conjecture by John von Neumann. For this reason, it is sometimes referred to as being simply the Landauer bound or Landauer limit. In 2011, the principle was generalized to show that while information erasure requires an increase in entropy, that increase could theoretically occur at no energy cost. Instead, the cost can be taken in another conserved quantity, such as angular momentum. In a 2012 article published in "Nature", a team of physicists from the École normale supérieure de Lyon, University of Augsburg and the University of Kaiserslautern described that for the first time they have measured the tiny amount of heat released when an individual bit of data is erased. In 2014, physical experiments tested Landauer's principle and confirmed its predictions.