|
Seminal contributions to an understanding of the physics of information were made by Rolf Landauer and Charles Bennett. In this paper, Bennett provides a review of the history of the thermodynamics of information processing in which he describes Landauer's 1961 paper, “Irreversibility and heat generation in the computing process,” IBM Journal of Research and Development 5, No. 3, pp. 183-191 (1961), as a major turning point. Landauer had shown that only irreversible operations, those that discard information, dissipate energy. Bennett pointed out that computation, in principle, did not have to discard information and thus could be carried out with arbitrarily little energy dissipation.
To commemorate the important theoretical work of Landauer and Bennett, the IBM Journal of Research and Development published entire issues in their honor. Volume 32, Number 1 (1988) honored Rolf Landauer, and Volume 48, Number 1 (2004) honored Charles Bennett.
In recent years, work on the physics of information has led to advances in the statistical physics of lattice systems, quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, and quantum computing. The first quantum cryptography experiments are described in a retrospective paper by J. Smolin, “The early days of experimental quantum cryptography,” IBM Journal of Research and Development 48, No. 1, pp. 47-52 (2004).
|
