Researchers prove Landauer was right in saying heat is dissipated when memory is erased
(PhysOrg.com) -- For over half a century, physicists and computer scientists have been troubled by a theoretical concept set forth by Rolf Landauer. He suggested that the very act of erasing a bit of memory in a digital system causes heat to be dissipated. This little idea has bothered researchers for two reasons. One is because if true, it will mean there will come a time within the next couple of decades when fabricated memories will reach a point where they cannot be made any smaller due to the heat that will be dissipated when memory is erased. The other reason is because until now, no one has been able to prove whether it was really true or not; now all that has changed, much to the dismay of computer engineers. Eric Lutz and his colleagues at the University of Augsburg in Germany have devised an experiment that proves that...