Landauer's principle

Landauer's principle is a physical principle pertaining to a lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation. It holds that an irreversible change in information stored in a computer, such as merging two computational paths, dissipates a minimum amount of heat to its surroundings. It is hypothesized that energy consumption below this lower bound would require the development of reversible computing.

The principle was first proposed by Rolf Landauer in 1961.