Ask A Genius 666: Injecting Information Into the Future
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/01/08
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Who’s likely in his eighties now. Hold on, the heater just came on, so you’ll need to start that second point again, and a bit louder, please. Yeah, I’m not entirely sure, but from your explanation, I’d probably need to read the paper or something. It sounds like he’s suggesting that the injection of information creates the future; that the future is a subsequent moment in time where open quantum situations have been resolved, which is pretty much what we’re saying. And you mentioned he had two laws of information, which we should consider.
I’m leaning towards the idea that, in the universe, you don’t need a compact digital representation of information. Instead, the information is contained within finite physical systems; the standard array of fundamental particles and their interactions. But these interactions are not digital in nature, as they don’t encode information digitally in a compact manner. Rather, information is held in a more holographic fashion, which requires these bas… What’s that? Well, in computer information, each bit of information is stored at a specific location in the hardware, within a system of circuits and memory. My guess is that in the universe, information isn’t stored because a specific electron, especially considering the problem with identifying particular electrons under quantum mechanics, as electrons are pretty indistinguishable. But rather, information is stored through a vast history among a whole lot of particles. The information is interwoven into all their relations and histories, not stored at specific points.
Okay, but I don’t particularly like the term ‘holographic.’ Maybe ‘relational’ is a better term, suggesting that information is stored more in the universe as a whole. Yeah, I mean, you have to reconcile the idea that the universe is some kind of semi-optimized system for cataloging all the relationships among its component parts. It’s arranged in a way that minimizes the total aggregate distance among the connected elements in the universe. For example, a connected set of elements could be an electron falling to a lower energy shell around a nucleus, and a photon is emitted. At some future point, that photon is absorbed by another atom. That’s a relationship, a connection between those two atoms. The universe can perhaps be seen as a catalog of all these connected atoms, arranged in such a way to maintain causality and some kind of minimal arrangement of those relationships. The minimal quantity might be aggregate distance, or it might be something less obvious. The universe is a manifestation of these connected elements, and probably not just the elements themselves, but also tacitly the elements that aren’t connected. When a photon is emitted and makes it beyond the surface of the sun, the odds are like only one in a trillion that it’ll run into anything in the visible universe. It’ll just keep going. So, that photon doesn’t have a relationship with anything in the visible universe, except for gravitational interaction. Its path is shaped by the shape of the universe, but it goes billions of light years without being absorbed and maybe does get absorbed in the mess at t=0 (T-zero). So, you have the explicit relationships between atoms that exchange a photon, and then you have the implicit non-relationships with photons that just keep going. Information is stored in all these relationships, rather than in… I mean, there is a specific event that precipitated the sharing of information when the photon is emitted. Then, information is tacitly shared about this event with the rest of the universe by the emitted photon traveling for billions of years. But that’s not as digital a thing as Fredkin is suggesting in a digital universe. And what’s his second principle? That information can neither be created nor destroyed, right? Information is conserved like other things in the universe.
I don’t know, you said he had these two principles of information, I’m not sure if it’s 1978 or 1992 or neither. Yeah, I don’t want to talk about that anymore. Let’s talk about what you mentioned off tape earlier. Fredkin said that information might be conserved; neither created nor destroyed. I wouldn’t agree with that, but I would agree that when information is created or destroyed, it follows the rules of quantum mechanics and the yet unfleshed-out rules of IC where information can only slide into or out of the universe in ways that are dictated by IC plus quantum mechanics. Information slides into the universe at the edges from around t=0. As the universe’s apparent age increases and more things become visible at the edge of the universe, you see older stuff becoming visible as the universe unfolds; you’re able to see farther back into the universe, and as those early galaxies age, you can get more information from them. It’s different under IC, but there are some commonalities with the big bang theory. Similarly, information can be obliterated as the apparent age of the universe is reduced, as the temperature of the universe increases. The armature or the hardware of the universe can have room for more information, or it can break down, and the universe can lose information. But you don’t see the armature from within the universe; you see the universe as having an increasing apparent age as it acquires information or a decreasing apparent age as it loses information. That decreasing apparent age is seen from within the universe as the temperature, the background temperature of the universe increasing, and that heat obliterating information, particularly at the edges. By saying that, I agree with Fredkin that there are rules for… but I don’t agree that information is conserved. However, I do agree that information is subject to precise rules as to when and how it can be created or lost.
[Recording End]
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