This paper feels very unconvincing. It seems to just assume that there is some intrinsic entropy inside a particle which, by virtue of their annihilation, must be released. I'm fairly sure that is not at all what the Landauer limit is talking about. This cited paper <a href="https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0064475" rel="nofollow">https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0064475</a> comes up a with a number and says it's intrinsic in each particle, but.. that just seems so sketchy.<p>The Landauer limit says: since entropy can't be destroyed, if an irreversible computation takes place -- if a bit is 'erased' -- the entropy must be released a heat. Then, using dE = T dS, that change in entropy ought to correspond to a change in energy.<p>Nowhere in this is it claimed that particles store intrinsic bits of information. It's just talking about data that is modeled in the _state_ of a system. Erasing a bit means collapsing two states of the system into one.<p>Also, maybe I'm being unfair here, but I'd guess that no paper about entropy that starts with "digital information storage technologies have radically transformed our modern society" is going to end up being good.
I don't see a convincing reason why information conservation would need two additional photons. The author mentions himself in the conclusions that the standard two photons of the annihilation process could carry the additional energy.
On the contrary. Take a punch-card, stick it in your 029 keypunch, and add 80 bytes of information to it by typing away. Now it weighs less than when you started. Information has negative mass.
Just a warning: professor A Dońda in the book “The Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy” (1973, by Stanislaw Lem) made already an experiment in such matter: while transforming information into mass he reached critical mass - what resulted in the disappearance of the contents of all computer data banks and collapse of human civilization.
Can someone explain to me, what actually constitutes that a particle has information or has no information? I.e., what would actually cause a change of this state?<p>I would expect, that having just 0 or 1 alone would not. Maybe it is related to an observer/environment, i.e. the reduction of the wave superposition to certain possible states...