New Special Issue "Physical Information and the Physical Foundations of Computation"

Dear Colleagues,

Nearly six decades have passed since Landauer declared that “information is physical” and proposed a fundamental thermodynamic link between information erasure and heat generation in computing processes. While Landauer’s ideas have been extensively analyzed, interpreted, and critiqued from multiple perspectives and have been generalized and extended within various physical theories of information and computation, they remain stubbornly controversial. This is a symptom of a broader and somewhat ironic predicament: Deep in this information age, we have highly sophisticated and widely used models of computing machines as physical systems, but we remain without a comprehensive and widely accepted fundamental understanding of computation as a distinct physical process with information as its physical currency. Without such an understanding, we cannot expect consensus resolution of contested claims associated with the physicality of information or, more generally, claim an established physical foundation for computation.

This Special Issue aims to clarify and advance the physical understanding of information and computation. We invite a broad range of original, high-quality contributions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives—including but not limited to engineering, physics, computer science, neuroscience, information science, biological physics, and the philosophy of science—that explicitly address fundamental links between physics, information, and computation. Submissions are welcome on all topics that serve to clarify and illuminate the physical dimensions of information and computation, codify them in physical definitions and theories, and reveal their consequences and implications.

Prof. Neal G. Anderson

Guest Editor

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/special_issues/information_computation