Born to Do Math 180 – Dissolution, Disintegration, Decay, Decomposition, Defunction and Putrescence
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/08/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How can the universe lose information, part of it structure, internally, in other words?
Rick Rosner: Assuming: Let’s say one way to lose information that is uncommon is to find out everything you know to be true, isn’t true. That you get plunged into chaos because the world that you live in is chaos, but that’s not really what we’re talking about because you still have your memories. Even as fucked up as the world is now, it works on the 99.9999% rules. Democracy may not be working, but gravity works. We still live in three dimensions. The more common way to lose information, or the more devastating and pervasive way to lose information, is the hardware to break down – for your brain to lose the ability to lose information.
As you get older, you can get Alzheimer’s. Somebody with Alzheimer’s goes to retrieve the information that they have been retrieving all their lives, like words, and it’s not there; it doesn’t come up. You can get the same feeling without Alzheimer’s, e.g., being tired, or a simple glitch. Boogie Nights has been on a lot lately. The Red Head who plays Burt Reynolds’s wife has been on, but you can’t remember the name. “It’s Juliet something.” You can’t remember it. I had this happen a couple of weeks ago. It took time to remember Julianne Moore. Even though, she is a pretty big time actress. Although, in most circumstances, I would know her name.
It’s a combined hardware-software issue. You need the hardware. You need a functioning brain. Then you need enough experience with somebody, e.g., seeing Julianne Moore and knowing who she is, or having memorizing it. You could study Boogie Nights or The Red Head. I learned some things. Your hardware could get bad. What does a fuzzier mental landscape look like? If we’re positing, as we have been for years and years, that our information landscape looks like a physical landscape, then that universe with lesser information will be smaller and hotter. Hotter seems counterintuitive.
Because hotness seems like it should be information. All those thermal photons seems like they’re carrying information. We have background thermal noise in the universe. That is the Cosmic Background Radiation. It’s not very noisy. Because we live in a very information packed, very big, very apparently old, universe. These thermal photons are from what is apparently 300,000 years old. Now, we are at 13.8 billion years old. The photons using a naïve calculation that is probably wrong only have 1/46,000th the energy they originally had. The background temperature of these old ass photons – the oldest photons in the universe – is only 2.7 degrees Kelvin. That’s not enough to disrupt much.
It is probably hard to even absorb these photons because they were first discovered in 1964 or something. When some people at Bell Labs were building a big old radio telescope, the signals that they were getting, were noisy. They thought it was bird shit on it. You’ve seen what a radio telescope looks like. It is a giant bowl. It can be like 300 feet across or more. They had this big old thing. The birds were shitting on it. They realized that it was background radiation. They needed this big apparatus to discover the very long wavelength photons. Those old school TV antennas were 3 feet across to capture TV signals. Those would be anywhere big enough to capture CMB photons.
You need a wingspan to capture these long ass photons, spread out photons. So, anyway, they don’t do much interfering with stuff. In a low information universe or a universe losing information, a heating up universe, the universe might appear to be collapsing. As the universe pulls in on itself, the background radiation gets hotter and hotter. I don’t think the universe operates like an oscillating or Big Bang universe in which there is a falling back in. I think a universe that’s losing information shares some outward characteristics with an oscillating universe that is collapsing, but a Big Bang universe exploding outward and runs out of enough kinetic energy and then falls back in on itself has the same amount of matter in it or matter/energy.
So, we are under a Big Bang system if that were true; the universe that we have that has 10^11th galaxies would have the same number of galaxies, roughly. Maybe, some of them would become less visible. Maybe, some stuff falls out; maybe, the horizon would get shorter and less of the universe would be less accessible. A universe losing information would have the size of the universe proportional to the amount of matter and energy, so information, in it. You’d see fewer and fewer outlying galaxies. Everything would get hotter and hotter, until everything boils away to nothing and all information is lost. Maybe, the math of a collapsing Big Bang universe has those same outward characteristics.
Less and less of it becomes or remains visible. I don’t know the math or come close to knowing the math. Information is lost at the edges of the universe. As the universe heats back up, stuff that was clearly defined – particles, positions space – become blurrier. So, there’s less information to exchange signals and bounce signals off. The massive amount of information is what keeps the particles in the universe nicely tightly defined. The less exchange between particles and everything gets blurrier and blurrier. Looking at it from a different point of view, the 80-year-old person’s brain cannot hold onto anything anymore, cannot reliably retrieve the information that helps structure consciousness.
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