Landauer's Bit-Erasure Engine

This simulator makes Landauer's principle — the physical limit on how cheaply information can be destroyed — something you can watch happen. A single overdamped particle sits in a 3D double-well potential, standing in for one classical bit: left well is "0", right well is "1". Pressing Run Erasure executes the real physical protocol used to force an unknown bit into a known state — lower the barrier, tilt the well toward the target, then restore the barrier — while the simulator tallies, step by step, exactly how much work the controller had to supply to reshape the potential. Slow the protocol down and the measured work creeps toward the theoretical floor of k_BT ln2 per bit; rush it and you pay a dissipation tax, exactly as Landauer predicted in 1961 and Bérut's group measured in a real lab in 2012.