July 12, 2010
Physics, Information Theory, and the Holographic Principle
Link to World made of Information post
Link to Boundary Dissolution post
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.asp?showID=11140
http://community.livejournal.com/ref_sciam/1190.html
http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/information.is.not.uncertainty.html
http://www.ccrnp.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/bionet.info-theory.faq.html#Information.Equal.Entropy
http://homepage.mac.com/photomorphose/documents/qpdf.pdf
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/computeruniverse.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_explosion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_information_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_information
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_ensemble
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computation
http://se10.comlab.ox.ac.uk:8080/InformaticPhenomena/IntroductiontoOASIS_en.html
http://crpit.com/confpapers/CRPITV37Floridi.pdf
http://philpapers.org/browse/pancomputationalism
http://consc.net/papers/facing.html
http://www.weylmann.com/wheeler.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrodynamics
Information in the Holographic Universe by Jacob D. Bekenstein [July 14,2003] Scientific American
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_information
In physics, physical information refers generally to the information that is contained in a physical system. Its usage in quantum mechanics (ie. quantum information) is important, for example in the concept of quantum entanglement to describe effectively direct or causal relationships between apparently distinct or spatially separated particles.
Information itself may be loosely defined as “that which can distinguish one thing from another”. The information embodied by a thing can thus be said to be the identity of the particular thing itself, that is, all of its properties, all that makes it distinct from other (real or potential) things. It is a complete description of the thing, but in a sense that is divorced from any particular language. We might even consider the sum total of the information in a thing to be the ideal essence of the thing itself, i.e. its form in the sense of Plato’s eidos (The Forms).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_dimension_(geometry)
“In 1993 the physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft put forward the holographic principle, which explains that the information about an extra dimension is visible as a curvature in a spacetime with one fewer dimensions. For example, holograms are three-dimensional pictures placed on a two-dimensional surface, which gives the image a curvature when the observer moves. Similarly, in general relativity, the fourth dimension is manifested in observable three dimensions as the curvature of path of a moving infinitesimal (test) particle. Hooft has speculated that the fifth dimension is really the spacetime fabric.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_entropy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_entropy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_Observer_Analysis
All dimensions contained in the same space. 0, 1, Infinity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics
Some try to identify single physical particles with simple bits. For example, if one particle, such as an electron, is switching from one quantum state to another, it may be the same as if a bit is changed from one value (0, say) to the other (1). A single bit suffices to describe a single quantum switch of a given particle. As the universe appears to be composed of elementary particles whose behavior can be completely described by the quantum switches they undergo, that implies that the universe as a whole can be described by bits. Every state is information, and every change of state is a change in information (requiring the manipulation of one or more bits). Setting aside dark matter and dark energy, which are poorly understood at present, the known universe consists of about 10^80 protons and the same number of electrons. Hence, the universe could be simulated by a computer capable of storing and manipulating about 10^90 bits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
“Entropy, if considered as information (see information entropy), is measured in bits. The total quantity of bits is related to the total degrees of freedom of matter/energy.
In a given volume, there is an upper limit to the density of information about the whereabouts of all the particles which compose matter in that volume, suggesting that matter itself cannot be subdivided infinitely many times and there must be an ultimate level of fundamental particles. As the degrees of freedom of a particle are the product of all the degrees of freedom of its sub-particles, were a particle to have infinite subdivisions into lower-level particles, then the degrees of freedom of the original particle must be infinite, violating the maximal limit of entropy density. The holographic principle thus implies that the subdivisions must stop at some level, and that the fundamental particle is a bit (1 or 0) of information.”
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“The physical universe is widely seen to be composed of “matter” and “energy”. In his 2003 article published in Scientific American magazine, Jacob Bekenstein summarized a current trend started by John Archibald Wheeler, which suggests scientists may “regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals.” Bekenstein quotes William Blake and questions whether the Holographic principle implies that seeing “the world in a grain of sand,” could be more than “poetic license”.”
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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.
“The holographic principle states that the entropy of ordinary mass (not just black holes) is also proportional to surface area and not volume; that volume itself is illusory and the universe is really a hologram which is isomorphic to the information “inscribed” on the surface of its boundary.”
Richard Feynman on Light
Wheeler’s “it from bit”
Following Jaynes and Weizsäcker, the physicist John Archibald Wheeler wrote the following:
It is not unreasonable to imagine that information sits at the core of physics, just as it sits at the core of a computer.
It from bit. Otherwise put, every ‘it’—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. ‘It from bit’ symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe. (John Archibald Wheeler 1990: 5)
David Chalmers of the Australian National University summarised Wheeler’s views as follows:
Wheeler (1990) has suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. According to this ‘it from bit’ doctrine, the laws of physics can be cast in terms of information, postulating different states that give rise to different effects without actually saying what those states are. It is only their position in an information space that counts. If so, then information is a natural candidate to also play a role in a fundamental theory of consciousness. We are led to a conception of the world on which information is truly fundamental, and on which it has two basic aspects, corresponding to the physical and the phenomenal features of the world.
Chris Langan also builds upon Wheeler’s views in his epistemological metatheory:
The Future of Reality Theory According to John Wheeler: In 1979, the celebrated physicist John Wheeler, having coined the phrase “black hole”, put it to good philosophical use in the title of an exploratory paper, Beyond the Black Hole, in which he describes the universe as a self-excited circuit. The paper includes an illustration in which one side of an uppercase U, ostensibly standing for Universe, is endowed with a large and rather intelligent-looking eye intently regarding the other side, which it ostensibly acquires through observation as sensory information. By dint of placement, the eye stands for the sensory or cognitive aspect of reality, perhaps even a human spectator within the universe, while the eye’s perceptual target represents the informational aspect of reality. By virtue of these complementary aspects, it seems that the universe can in some sense, but not necessarily that of common usage, be described as “conscious” and “introspective”…perhaps even “infocognitive”.
The first formal presentation of the idea that information might be the fundamental quantity at the core of physics seems to be due to Frederick W. Kantor (a physicist from Columbia University). Kantor’s book Information Mechanics (Wiley-Interscience, 1977) developed this idea in detail, but without mathematical rigor.
The toughest nut to crack in Wheeler’s research program of a digital dissolution of physical being in a unified physics, Wheeler himself says, is time. In a 1986 eulogy to the mathematician, Hermann Weyl, he proclaimed: “Time, among all concepts in the world of physics, puts up the greatest resistance to being dethroned from ideal continuum to the world of the discrete, of information, of bits. … Of all obstacles to a thoroughly penetrating account of existence, none looms up more dismayingly than ‘time.’ Explain time? Not without explaining existence. Explain existence? Not without explaining time. To uncover the deep and hidden connection between time and existence … is a task for the future.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptote
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychophysics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_series
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_progression
Asymptotic Series
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_growth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth