Part 7/9:
In the 1960s, Rolf Landauer further refined these ideas, positing that the real entropy increase occurs not during the information acquisition phase but when the demon erases that information after it has been used. This erasure, which transforms the information into a physical bit that must be reset, is thermodynamically costly and indeed contributes to an increase in entropy. According to Landauer, the act of erasing information dissipates energy equivalent to ( kT \log 2 ), thereby preserving the integrity of the second law of thermodynamics.