Computing's power limit demonstrated

Physicists in Europe have experimentally demonstrated, for the first time, that a theoretical principle limiting modern-day computing is real. In 1961, Rolf Landauer posited that the act of erasing a bit of information gives off an amount of heat equal to k
_B
Tln(2), which is the product of Boltzmann's constant, the temperature, and the natural logarithm of 2-a total of 3 × 10
^-21
joules at room temperature. Among other things, the theory has been used to address the famous problem of Maxwell's Demon, a thought experiment that suggested a minute monster could create energy for free by sorting particles by their speed, in apparent violation of the laws of thermodynamics. Charles Bennett applied Landauer's theory to the problem, arguing that the energy wasn't free because the demon had to erase a bit of information in its memory in order to sort each particle.