[HN Gopher] Is information the fifth state of matter? ___________________________________________________________________ Is information the fifth state of matter? Author : akvadrako Score : 36 points Date : 2022-03-10 09:12 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.zmescience.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.zmescience.com) | JohnHaugeland wrote: | Until you can cause phase shifts of other matter to and from | information, it's an obvious no. | | Oh, you're going to take a liquid, bake it into information, then | freeze it back into a liquid? Cool, cool | chroma wrote: | Looking at the paper linked to in the article[1], I'm having a | hard time not dismissing this immediately. There are several | implications to this theory: | | - Information has mass. | | - Information cannot exist at absolute zero. | | Does this mean that bringing a hard drive to absolute zero | changes its mass and erases its contents? Does the information | somehow come back after the drive is warmed up? Also there are | many ways to represent information: magnetic charges on a | spinning platter, electrical charges in SSDs, physical | impressions on metal, graphite on paper, etc. Do all of these get | destroyed at absolute zero? I don't know how that's reconcilable | with the rest of physics. | | 1. https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794 | readthenotes1 wrote: | 5th? There seems to be some information missing in the title. | Maybe not a massive amount. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_of_matter | IncRnd wrote: | I think they were referencing solid, liquid, gas, plasma, | information as five natural states of matter. | jdrc wrote: | I think they misused "state of matter" to mean "fundamental | property". | [deleted] | badrabbit wrote: | More like matter is an expression of information imo | abeppu wrote: | > Since every particle is supposed to contain information, which | supposedly has its own mass, then that information has to go | somewhere when the particle is annihilated. In this case, the | information should be converted into low-energy infrared photons. | | How does this compare to the very very low amount of heat | released when a bit is erased under Landauer's principle? How | many bits does a particle store? Does it store its location? Does | the number of its needed to store that depend on a choice of | units, frame of reference, and resolution? | adamrezich wrote: | _In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the | Word was God._ | infogulch wrote: | > [matter-antimatter annihilation] converts all the mass of the | annihilating particles into energy, typically gamma photons. | However, if the particles do contain information, then this also | needs to be conserved upon annihilation, producing some lower- | energy photons. In the present study, I predicted the exact | energy of the infrared red photons resulting from this | information erasure, and I gave a detailed protocol for the | experimental testing involving the electron-positron annihilation | process. | | Neat. | adonovan wrote: | This seems to be a pet theory of one researcher (Vopson). Have | any other physicists written anything about it, supportive or | critical? | _Nat_ wrote: | This seems like confusion over [the map/territory relationship](h | ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation ): | | > "A map is not the territory" | | Whatever reality might be considered to involve -- mass, energy, | entropy, time, whatever -- it's information that we actually | consider in our minds. | | In grade-school physics, it may be all too easy to confuse the | map for the territory, because everything's just so simple that | students might feel little compulsion to put much thought into | things. But it's always been information. | | If someone wants a string 2-meters long, they might measure out | two lengths of 1-meter strings, then tie them together. If the | result isn't close enough to 2-meters, then they might reason | that they ought to be more precise -- they ought to better | measure the 1-meter strings, consider the length-contraction due | to tying the knot, and so forth. And then, they might think that | there's a difference between the string and their information | about it. | | But further away, in more exotic contexts like in sub-atomic | quantum-mechanical arenas or near black-holes, there might be | less intuition about the things like strings -- folks may be | pushing harder, working more heavily with information without a | background sense of naturalness. Inferences may be drawn based on | information, and then more built upon that information, until it | seems like it's all information. | | But, to be clear, this isn't some new quality of reality; it's | how stuff's always worked. It's just how intellectual-computation | works. It's just that, when things were simpler, folks didn't | care to consider it. | | That said, reality isn't quite " _information_ "; it's just our | perceptions of reality that're information. This is, reality's | the territory, and our conceptions of it are the map. More | involved computational-modeling just helps make that more | apparent by undermining more naive modes of thinking about it. | cgio wrote: | I think there is an inversion here, though. The question | implicit in this context is not whether the map is the | territory, but whether the territory is the map. Now one can | see these as homophonic statements, but is this the case? When | is it or not? | hprotagonist wrote: | _For something to exist, it has to be observed. For something to | exist, it has to have a position in time and space. And this | explains why nine-tenths of the mass of the universe is | unaccounted for. Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of | the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. | Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical | exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is | unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest | of it, and you cannot see the back of your own head. (except in | very small universes). Nine-tenths of the universe, in fact, is | the _paperwork_._ | | --Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time | lmarcos wrote: | When studying physics (simple stuff like electromagnetism and | gravitational forces) I always wondered how the universe | "knows" what's the distance between two planets when it comes | to calculating forces amongst them. If the data (the distance) | actually exist, where is it stored? Is it perhaps calculated | "on the fly" so it doesn't need to be "stored"? | | Totally sure that's not how it works in real life, but for us | humans, that model is the best theory we have so far, so it's | difficult to think differently. | disambiguation wrote: | My understanding is probably also incorrect / incomplete, but | I use the "trampoline" mental model where objects on the | medium both update and react too the local geometry, ex. a | tennis ball will roll towards the bowling ball, but doesn't | "know" about the bowling ball. | | Though it begs the question _how_ a given particle has | read/write privileges with the geometry. | dghughes wrote: | When studying electronics I fell down the rabbit hole. | Electricity and magnetism are inseparable. I knew of EMF but | why did magnetism push something, where did the magnetism | come from, what are domains, how is magnetism emitted from | domains, how are the atoms involved, what are virtual | particles...and so on. | | When really as an electronics technican all I needed to know | was magnets can move things. | sritchie wrote: | Good question; I think the answer from general relativity is | that it doesn't, and that those changes are propagated out | locally at the speed of light. So it's a Newtonian fudge to | have variables like "distance between two bodies" in the | equations. | | Mass changes spacetime curvature, and spacetime curvature | pushes masses around, back and forth in a grand dance! | lmarcos wrote: | I definitely don't know much about general relativity, but | isn't it yet another model/theory? A better one I bet, but | one that still relies on information, so when we talk about | "mass changes spacetime...", well my question remains: "how | does the universe know, for instance, the mass of the sun | in order for the universe to allow the deformation of | spacetime that the sun causes?" I know it's probably not a | rational question, but I used to ask that question to | myself when I was a student. | mhh__ wrote: | Moving to a field theoretic model is precisely what | allows you to abstract away at least some of those | questions. | | Space-time is distorted by energy, rather than just mass, | which reduces the number of things the universe has to be | prescient to. We can further eliminate some more | prescience, by thinking in terms of density rather than | mass: The laws of physics stated locally require only | (say) a number and a field, rather than a pesky integral. | | "Space tells matter how to move, Matter tells space how | to curve" | | And asking these questions is a good thing. I've been | sitting down and really thinking about special relativity | recently, it's fun going through old papers and seeing | about how to derive the algebra in the most smugly | experiment-less way. | evanb wrote: | On of the (self-admitted) flaws in Newton's conception of | gravity is that it's in terms of forces (or potentials) | that act across large distances; it's part of his | "hypotheses non fingo". | | One of the philosophically more pleasing things about GR | is that it is local. But, of course, Newton's conception | is a small-mass / low-velocity limit, so how can that be? | | GR says that the effect of stress/energy at a place x | changes the metric at that place. But the metric is | something made of derivatives, so the space in some small | neighborhood (this is the local part) nearby gets | deformed. That deformation is itself a form of stress, | and so places in the neighborhood of x effect places | THEIR neighborhoods and so on. | | So there's nothing built-in that's long-distance. Big | long-distance effects are built up out of everybody | talking to their immediate neighbors. | voakbasda wrote: | And all of that back and forth can be represented | mathematically as an n-body problem: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem | disconcision wrote: | interesting, this feels quite close to verlinde's entropic | gravity theory, that "gravity is a consequence of the | "information associated with the positions of material bodies" | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity) | inopinatus wrote: | All matter is information, all information is functional, and | perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe. | | (in the Greg Egan edition of this thesis, the speed of light | emerges as a property of evaluative propagation through a | functional universe, and new forms of consciousness are | encountered living within the Lisp machine of the cosmos) | amelius wrote: | > All matter is information, all information is functional, and | perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe. | | If the universe is deterministic, then there is no information | (everything can be computed from the initial conditions). | lmarcos wrote: | Aren't then the initial conditions information? | AA-BA-94-2A-56 wrote: | And aren't the lambdas that evaluate the information | information as well? | quirkot wrote: | Either this uses the word "information" in a way that is 99% | divorced from common usage or the philosophical implications of | this are massive. It would essentially mean that truth or falsity | is an inherent property of the universe. Is this string gibberish | or is it information? Might even change cryptography forever, too | gfodor wrote: | It's information in the Shannon sense of information entropy, | which is about the rarity of sequences of bits, not the notion | of bits themselves. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) | joe_the_user wrote: | How could this possibly be a "state of matter" ("the fifth" | in contrast to sold, liquid, gas and plasma, the standard | four)? Entropy and information are qualities which all states | of matter have. | | And Information as a quality of matter is already taken into | account by a variety of physical theories - none of which | label information a "state of matter"? | akvadrako wrote: | I think the 5 states thing is a confusion of the reporter. | | The theory is saying that energy (or mass) can be converted | to information and that it isn't a quality of matter. | gfodor wrote: | The OP claims that low information entropy results in an | increase in mass. | | I don't believe the 'state of matter' bit is exactly right, | it seems to be an extension to the mass-energy equivalence | theorem. (IANAP) | infogulch wrote: | The reality of information is pretty well accepted. Take the | black hole information paradox for example, which observes that | 1. Hawking radiation means that black holes eventually | evaporate, and 2. information about the infalling matter cannot | be destroyed, so where does the information go after the black | hole is evaporated? This study proposes a different way to test | the reality of information that is a bit more... | _experimentally accessible_ than an event horizon. | gfodor wrote: | Here's the link to the (recently published) experiment proposal | paper: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0087175 | 7373737373 wrote: | What does it mean for an electron to have e.g. 1.509 bits of | information? | klyrs wrote: | That number is an average number of bits per elementary | particle. I presume that information can be found not only in | particles, but also in how they're arranged. | | On the other hand, information need not come in whole bits: | there are three quark "colors." Storing the color of a quark | takes, what, 1.5 bits on average? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-11 23:00 UTC)