Rolf Landauer’s result of 1961, published at IBM: erasing one bit of information carries an unavoidable minimum thermodynamic cost, of order kT ln 2 of energy dissipated as heat. It is the bridge between information theory and thermodynamics, it resolves Maxwell’s demon, and it was confirmed experimentally in 2012.
Accepted physics, and what it does not say
It is not contested, and this is worth stating clearly because of what gets built on it. The principle constrains the energy cost of erasure. It does not say that information has mass, it does not say that stored data gravitates, and it does not say anything about what information is made of.
The chain built on it
The Jorjani - Danny Jones Podcast 2025 interview starts here, adds mass-energy equivalence to argue that stored information must therefore have a small physical mass, reaches for John Archibald Wheeler’s “it from bit” and Melvin Vopson’s published mass-energy-information work, and then concludes that the unseen mass of stored data simply is dark matter. The first two steps are real physics and a published hypothesis. The identity claim at the end is the speaker’s alone, and Landauer’s principle does not license it.
Connections
John Archibald Wheeler · Melvin Vopson · Jorjani - Danny Jones Podcast 2025 · Jason Reza Jorjani · Simulation Argument · The Simulation Hypothesis · Zero-Point Energy