[HN Gopher] Is information the fifth state of matter?
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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?
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