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

Manuscript Submission Information 

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Entropyis an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions. For invited papers by the Guest Editor which are submitted before 31 December 2020, we can apply a discount of 200 CHF. Please also note that for papers submitted after 31 December 2020 an APC of 1800 CHF applies.