Physics and information

[Cortex_Colossus]

Energy, matter and information equivalence

Shannon's efforts to find a way to quantify the information contained in, for example, an e-mail message led him unexpectedly to a formula with the same form as Boltzmann's. Bekenstein summarizes that "Thermodynamic entropy and Shannon entropy are conceptually equivalent: the number of arrangements that are counted by Boltzmann entropy reflects the amount of Shannon information one would need to implement any particular arrangement..." of matter and energy. The only salient difference between the thermodynamic entropy of physics and the Shannon's entropy of information is in the units of measure; the former is expressed in units of energy divided by temperature, the latter in essentially dimensionless "bits" of information, and so the difference is merely a matter of convention.

So essentially matter and energy are reduced even further to be defined as information or 0's and 1's, while the self-perceptual universe evolves to create evolutionary laws that behave as a teleological means to create an recreate itself. The universe has its own means of read/write operation in its inherent mathematical language. This could possibly mean that the universe is ultimately a logical mind evolving and sometimes devolving internally (since there is nothing outside of it, nothing is infinite freedom from information onstraint). In order for life to evolve it must have a logical purpose in the universe. Reality is not absolute and thus the laws of nature can change and adjust in a process called telic recursion.

 

[CptBork]

The way I see it, conceptually one could imagine that we are in a world like the imaginary world of "The Matrix". We think we're real physical people, but really we're just subroutines running on a computer, exchanging info with other subroutines and submitting ourselves to various calculations which then change our own programming accordingly.

The programmers of our "Matrix world" attempted their best to give us a detailed and consistent world, with well-defined physical laws that would make our everyday activities possible within this framework. The problem is, they couldn't program things down to an infinite level of detail- they had to cut it off at some point. So they just decided they would set the limit point somewhere around the scale of quarks, pions, leptons... And we can't store an infinite, continuous set of variables on a computer, so the programmers decided to discretize everything, i.e. by making lots of physical quantities simple multiples of $$\frac{\hbar}{2}$$. What's the big deal? It's not like we're ever going to notice...

Obviously I don't really believe this is how things are, I'm just saying QM is very ambiguous when it comes to reasons for the underlying behaviour, and there are any number of possible explanations. That we are all living in a computer is just my favourite way of thinking about it, because it makes a cool "what if" scenario.

 

[Reiku]

The problem i have that they world can be seen as being built up on binary-like codes, it that any stucture like that still reaches the same conditions any astrophysical and cosmological theory would have to reach, a singularity. How do zeros and ones answer for a singularity, when common math cannot deal with them rationally, because any value derived, always has a higher value. It can't describe reality as a whole, any more than physics can with current knowledge.

 

[Vkothii]

Another angle on this theme is that information, per se, can't be "seen" without the transfer of energy. So energy has or is information. Energy and mass are equivalent, and information can't exist without relativity.