Born to do Math 10 – Alpha Particles and Informational History
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/03/17
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Rick Rosner: Alright, so, we believe—people who believe in informational cosmology, which is the idea that the universe consists of information and is information about something else; not just about the universe itself, and the universe is isomorphic to itself as a map to the information that it contains. It is a map of information. It is also the information. But if we’re going to talk about that, at some point, we need to put the money where our mouths are and need to explain where the information is.
Our ideas at this point are, not non-existent but are, pretty vague. Most of the information—the universe consists of particles. Most particles have fairly simple structures, such that those structures can’t contain much or any information on their own. For instance, electrons have no guts. They have no inner detail, no inner architecture. They are just whatever they are when they are localized to a point based on interactions or a probability cloud.
They have no parts. Ditto for photons. They are bundles of energy, not consisting of—anyway, protons consist of three quarks. Also, the very quickly emerging and vanishing particles that mediate the forces among the quarks. So protons have a lot of stuff going on. These protons bouncing and swirling off of and around each other. But still not enough inner structure to have any kind of readable history.
The only time you get history is if you get the smallest unit that contains any kind of readable history might be a nucleus that reflect or generally only arises via a series of radioactive decays. Some things start off heavy and unstable nuclei and spit out bunch helium nuclei. Is it alpha particles that are the helium nuclei? They spit out a bunch of those and you end up with some radioactive form of iodine. So you can look at that nucleus and say, “Yea, that’s its history.”
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