# Disentangling Brillouin’s Negentropy Law of Information and Landauer’s Law on Data Erasure

## TL;DR

This paper clarifies the difference between two theories linking information and energy, showing that Landauer's law is based on a confusion between information and data.

## Contribution

The paper identifies a conceptual confusion in Landauer's law and explains its prevalence through a materialist reductionist tendency.

## Key findings

- Landauer’s law confuses information with data, leading to inconsistencies.
- Brillouin’s negentropy law is more robust and compatible with thermodynamics and information theory.
- The paper attributes the dominance of Landauer’s law to reductionist materialism.

## Abstract

The link between information and energy introduces the observer and their knowledge into the understanding of a fundamental quantity in 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 Clausius’ inequality and Shannon’s mathematical results, is very robust, whereas the second, based on the simple idea that information requires a material embodiment (data bits), is now perceived as more physical and therefore 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 as being due to a frequent tendency of materialism towards reductionism, neglecting emergence and seeking to eliminate the role of the observer. A paradoxical trend, considering 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.