Infogenesis (Part 11) – Information: It’s Not What You Think!

If you’ve been following my blog series “Infogenesis,” you know I’ve been vocal about exploring two radical aspects of information theory you may never have heard of:

1. Information is real, physical.
2. Information is a fundamental property of the universe.

If you’re like most, even me, your initial reaction to the above statements is to write them both off as mere conjecture, interesting theories perhaps, but a bit “way out there,” and therefore quite suspect. I’ll grant you this reaction is understandable, especially for claim #2. Although steadily gaining scientific adherents, the jury is still out on experimental proof as we wait for technology to advance enough for definitive experiments capable of making or breaking this particular claim.

But when it comes to claim #1 – that information is real, physical, which means that information can “do” things affecting physical reality and matter – here the research I’ve been doing contradicts the naysayers. And today I’m going to tell you about the experiments others have done that demonstrate that the naysayers are wrong.

The Comfortable Lie We’ve Been Living

When it comes to information, we’ve been lied to our entire lives. Not maliciously, not intentionally, but simply due to the limitations of everyday language. When we talk about “information,” we casually toss around words as if it’s all abstract, just data, bits, amorphic ideas floating in cyberspace e.g., remember Mulder and Sculley’s claim that “the information is ‘out there!’” Right? So, in our daily lives we speak of information as if it’s somehow separate from the physical world; as if our thoughts, computer files, and memories, exist in some ethereal realm beyond matter and energy.

This belief, however, is a fiction. Granted, it’s a fiction that makes us feel very comfortable, but the problem is – it is still a fiction, and it is dead wrong.

In the 1960s, physicist Rolf Landauer made a discovery that shattered our cozy assumptions about the nature of information. What he found wasn’t just theoretically interesting, he actually found a new fundamental law of physics that forces us to confront an unsettling truth: information is every bit as physical as the chair you’re sitting in.

Skeptical? Good. You should be. The claim that abstract information has physical substance sounds like mystical nonsense belonging in a New Age seminar, not a physics lab. You are right to question it.

But here’s the thing about science – it doesn’t care about your feelings or intuitions. Science only cares about what can be measured, tested, and proven (or disproven). And what Landauer proved, through rigorous experiment and with mathematical precision, is that information has physical properties that can be measured as precisely as mass or temperature!

The mathematical formula Landauer devised was later recognized by his peers who honored his discovery by calling it, “Landauer’s Principle.” This is the concept that states that any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as erasing or resetting even a single bit, must be accompanied by a minimum energy cost, which is dissipated as heat to the environment. You could call this the proverbial, “You don’t get somethin’ for nothin’ axiom.” Erasing information is going to cost you something. In this case, that cost is energy in the form of heat.

Still don’t buy it? I get that. So I tried to devise an analogy that might shed some light on what Landauer’s Principle means. Let me tell you my analogy of Robbie the memory-erasing robot. This may help. Prepare to have your understanding of reality fundamentally altered.

The Amazing Case of Robbie the Memory-Erasing Robot

Meet Robbie. Robbie is a perfectly frictionless robot (imagine him floating on air with no moving parts that rub together). He’s been given a simple job: sort red and blue colored balls into matching buckets as they come down a conveyor belt.

Here’s the catch: Robbie has a terrible memory, he can only remember one ball at a time. Thus, the process for performing his task is straightforward and a bit monotonous:

1. Pick up a ball.
2. Look at it and think “This ball is red” or “This ball is blue.”
3. Drop the ball into the appropriate bucket.
4. Completely forget everything about that ball to make room for the next memory
5. Go to step 1.

Robbie was good at his job, but the results of his effort blew scientists’ minds. You see, even though Robbie has no moving parts, ergo no friction at all, no electrical resistance, and no mechanical problems whatsoever, he still generated a measurable amount of heat from his task. That in itself is quite a surprise, but not as big as the next surprise – the heat generated from this process only appears at one specific moment – at step 4, when Robbie erases the information from his memory.

I had to think about this to get a sense of how extraordinary this discovery is: The physical act of forgetting “this ball was red” produces actual, measurable heat in the real world. Not from moving parts, not from electricity, but from erasing i.e., destroying,  information itself.

This Isn’t Science Fiction. It’s Science Fact!

This analogy might seem far-fetched, but I think it makes a point. IBM and other labs have conducted this experiment repeatedly. Additionally, back in 2012, physicists at École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, trapped a single silica particle in a double-well potential using optical tweezers – creating that “one-bit memory” from our analogy – and erased it. They observed that the heat released approached the theoretical minimum of kT ln(2) per bit, exactly as Landauer predicted.

This result wasn’t limited to classical systems either. In 2018, a landmark experiment using a trapped ultra-cold calcium ion confirmed Landauer’s minimum predicted value in a fully quantum setting. No loopholes, no exceptions, information erasure on its own produced the predicted heat.

This proves that the thought “this ball was red” isn’t just an abstract idea floating in Robbie’s circuits. Instead that information in Robbie’s head is as real and physical as the ball itself. When that information gets destroyed, it releases energy as heat, just like burning wood.

This is what I’ve been talking about. Information isn’t just data – it’s a real, physical entity made of actual substance in our universe.

The implications are kind of staggering: every time you forget something, you’re literally doing physical work. In that case, the older I get the more work I’m doing! LOL!

Anticipating Your Objections

I’ve tried to anticipate the objections skeptics might raise (you know who you are):

“This is just theoretical physics mumbo-jumbo! Show me some real experiments!” Wrong. IBM and other labs have repeatedly measured the tiny amounts of heat released during bit erasure in computer memory systems. The experiments are real, and so are the results.

“The heat must be coming from electrical resistance or friction!” Wrong. Scientists painstakingly eliminated ALL other heat sources. The heat remained, proportional only to the information being erased. This is exactly why Landauer’s principle was so shocking.

“The amounts are microscopic and therefore meaningless!” Wrong. The amount of heat doesn’t matter for proving the principle. Even tiny amounts of measurable heat prove information has physical substance.

“Correlation isn’t causation!” Landauer’s principle provides the precise mathematical formula: kT ln(2) per bit erased. When a theory predicts exact values and experiments repeatedly confirm them, that’s not coincidence folks, that’s causation – and proof!

“This violates common sense!” Yes! Exactly! That’s why Landauer’s principle represents a paradigm shift. It demonstrates that our common sense about information was wrong, forcing us to replace our faulty intuition with results born of experimental data.

Revolutionary Implications

Because information has real energy costs, even everyday acts like forgetting or deleting emails carry thermodynamic consequences. This reframes how we design energy-efficient computing and promises to stir future philosophical debates about the materiality of thought. If erasure produces heat in silicon chips, how much heat does forgetting produce in minds? Can we someday build reversible, near-zero-energy computers?

Landauer’s principle shows that information processing is physically grounded—it requires energy and produces heat. That doesn’t mean information or thoughts have measurable mass or weight. Here, “physical” means embodied: information must exist in a physical form to be processed or erased.

Welcome to a universe where information, while lacking mass, is nonetheless physically real through its energy footprint.

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Infogenesis (Part 10) – A Letter to Professor Michael Levin >>