Disentangling Brillouin's negentropy law of information and Landauer's law on data erasure

TL;DR

This paper clarifies the distinction between Brillouin's negentropy law and Landauer's data erasure law, arguing that conflating information with data leads to misconceptions and conflicts with thermodynamics.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that Landauer's law results from confusing information as an emergent concept with data as a physical object, challenging common interpretations.

Findings

Landauer's law arises from a confusion between information and data.

Brillouin's negentropy law is more robust and grounded in thermodynamics.

The paper advocates for viewing information and entropy as emergent, conventional quantities.

Abstract

The link between information and energy introduces the observer and their knowledge into the understanding of a fundamental quantity of physics. Two approaches compete to account for this link, Brillouin's negentropy law of information and Landauer's law on data erasure, which are often confused. The first, based on the Clausius' inequality and Shannon's mathematical results is very robust, while the second, based on the simple idea that information needs a material embodiment (data-bits) is today perceived as more physical and prevails. In this paper, we show that Landauer's idea results from a confusion between information (a global emergent concept) and data (a local material object). This confusion leads to many inconsistencies and is incompatible with thermodynamics and information theory. The reason it prevails is interpreted to be due to a frequent tendency of materialism towards reductionism, neglecting emergence and seeking to eliminate the role of the observer. A paradoxical trend given that it is often accompanied by the materialist idea that all scientific knowledge nevertheless originates from observation. Information and entropy are actually emergent quantities introduced in the theory by convention.