![]() Many widespread statements of Landauer’s principle are shown to be special cases of our generalized principle. We demonstrate a physical process that can perform any computation without work requirements or heat exchange with the environment. This confirms conjectures made that all logical operations may, in principle, be performed in a thermodynamically reversible fashion, although logically irreversible operations would require special, practically rather difficult, conditions to do so. We derive the most general statement of Landauer’s principle and prove its universality, extending considerably the validity of previous proofs. Here we examine the thermodynamics of such operations in more detail, extending the work of Landauer to include indeterministic operations and to include logical states with variable entropies, temperatures, and mean energies. 36, 355 2005 it is argued that to properly understand the thermodynamics of Landauer’s principle it is necessary to extend the concept of logical operations to include indeterministic operations. Some alternative possible explanations for the alignment of the two arrows will be briefly discussed This conclusion does not automatically imply a psychological arrow can run counter to the thermodynamic arrow. It will be shown that any computational process that can take place in an entropy increasing universe, can equally take place in an entropy decreasing universe. The principal arguments put forward by Schulman and Hawking will be shown to fail. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the support for the link between thermodynamics and an arrow of time for computers. ![]() Hawking (Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994) presents similar, if briefer, arguments. Schulman gives an explicit physical mechanism for this connection, based on the brain being representable as a computer, together with certain thermodynamic properties of computational processes. ![]() Schulman (Entropy 7(4):221–233, 2005) has argued that Boltzmann’s intuition, that the psychological arrow of time is necessarily aligned with the thermodynamic arrow, is correct. ![]()
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