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Theory of Information Could Resolve One of the Great Paradoxes of Cosmology
KentuckyFC writes: When physicists attempt to calculate the energy density of the universe from first principles, the number they come up using quantum mechanics is 10^94 g/cm^3 . And yet the observed energy density is about 10^-27 g/cm^3. In other words, our best theory of reality misses the mark by 120 orders of magnitude. Now one researcher says the paradox can be resolved by considering the information content of the universe. Specifying the location of the 10^25 stars in the visible universe to an accuracy of 10 cubic kilometers requires some 10^93 bits. And using Landauer's principle to calculate the energy associated with all these bits gives an energy density of about 10^-30 g/cm^3. That's not a bad first principles result. But if the location has to be specified to the Planck length, then the energy density is about 117 orders of magnitude larger. In other words, the nature of information should lie at the heart of our best theory of reality, not quantum mechanics.
Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you knew
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.
Why, for instance, 10 cubic-kilometer voxels? Why not 100, or 1, or 0.1? How about 10^{15} cubic kilometers, which is about the volume of the sun? Adjust this number correctly, and you can match any energy density you want.
This is the problem with the science blogosphere: they'll take any press release whatsoever and echo it around regardless of whether or not it makes any fucking sense at all.
And is false information "anti-matter"? Could be we will witness the end of the universe in a flame war on /.
Gently reply
What if the universe is 120 times larger? Maybe our part of the observable universe just looks like it happened from a Big Bang.
If you're starting with the location of stars, that's hardly a first principles calculation...?
We can't observe everything, because not everything is made of electromagnetic matter. You also can only detect electromagnetic energy until it actually interacts with electromagnetic matter. This information theory doesn't prove anything, only that what we see is the information that we see. Well, no shit Sherlock.
I think it makes them look like a clown, to be honest. Just put on a tiny bit of Chapstick every now and then to prevent dry lips and you're good to go. No clown makeup required.
Is it just me? slashdot seems to be very broken right now
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Tens of thousands of "Doctors of Philosophy" and just as many historians would disagree with you.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
To start with, I should point out that I am far from knowledgeable on these topics. I took physics in college, but my degrees are in math and CS.
But I've been reading a little on cosmology, QM and speculations about where our understanding is headed, and it's occurred to me (probably because one of the books I read suggested it; I don't recall) that a plausible explanation for observed reality may be that matter and energy are merely configurations of an underlying "substance": spacetime. Or, if you're a traditionalist, perhaps you can call it aether, though it's rather different than what used to be hypothesized under that label. What little I've understood of what I've read of string theory accords with an information-based reality, too, since the hypothesized strings encode a lot of information (yes, I'm waving my hands about, intensely).
If true, that means that the nature of the reality that we see really is pure information, and if that's the case, then information theory is really fundamental to cosmology and everything else. That's cool. Especially if, like so many here, you've devoted much of your life to logic and information.
Or maybe reality is something completely different. Or maybe we have no clue, and never will. But it's certainly very cool to speculate about -- and to the degree that our speculations result in models that appear to accurately explain our observations, very useful.
Now, having spouted what is likely a pile of complete nonsense, I'm hoping that someone who actually knows something will reply and straighten me out.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
In what sense is 'specifying the location' of cosmic objects a requisite for their existence?
As far as I can tell this is merely a requisite for OBSERVING their existence.
And I would imagine from first principles that this WOULD need to be accurate to the Planck length to be anything more than guessing.
...duh fuq?
Information is a foundation of quantum mechanics.
Just ask heisenberg, I'm sure he's certain about it.
What maybe interesting is does the uncertainty principle apply at large scale (I.E. a commutative property).
10^93 "bits"?
What is a "bit"?
What if true/false is not the right unit of measurement? I mean, maybe it takes 10^193 bits, because there are subparticles of bits that you haven't discovered yet?
Then again, I'm a doctor of philosophy and I agree with the original poster.
I've been wondering why my hair stands up in the back.
"In other words, the nature of information should lie at the heart of our best theory of reality, not quantum mechanics."
Say that to an electron.
Information in physics is defined as the log of number of possible states, which is quite specific, narrowly defined and unrelated to human creativity (or Godel).
"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality." - Nikola Tesla
"The scientists from Franklin to Morse were clear thinkers and did not produce erroneous theories. The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane" - Nikola Tesla
"There is not self containing theory possible aside from practical meaning, for a language is used in its annunciations, which miplys that developed ideas and complex porocesses of thoughts are alrealy in existance beside the general experience associated with there with. We define things in a phrase using words, these words hale to be explained by other words and so on forever in a complicated maze. There is no bottom to anything, we all upside down." - Oliver Heaviside
"They (Scientists) substitute words for realty, and after that talk about the words." - Edwin Armstrong
I for one welcome our new hipsteriffic spammish fluff-in-science-sauce clickbait posting overlords.
I also have a PhD, in physics, and I disagree with the original poster. There are many others that would disagree too. And some of those that agree with such sentiment seem to be confusing the "what counts with science" with "what science is of reasonable importance to follow through on." It seems a lot easier to for some to just dismiss something as unscientific versus arguing it seems unlikely to be fruitful even if technically fitting in fine with the whole real scientific method of proposing new ideas, checking for some sort of agreement with existing observations, and discussing where to go next (e.g. check against more existing observations, make new observations). Or worse, people dismissing something as unscientific because it contradicts gut feelings.
Exactly. When they plug in an accuracy that makes more sense, all of a sudden they are 117 orders of magnitude off. In other words, they could have gotten any result they wanted by just picking some arbitrary value for the accuracy. "How much do we need the result to be? OK, then let's pick... 10 cubic kilometers. Because the universe really cares about round units based on the circumference of some arbitrary planet in some arbitrary milky way. See, only three orders of magnitude off, our theory is now better than quantum physics!"
Next month, they'l publish a new paper in which they have refined their theory by taking an accuracy of 0.71 cubic km. There, our refined theory now exactly predicts the correct density of the universe, from first principles! Throw away quantum mechanics, information theory is clearly superior!
Is that lipstick makes a woman look hot, but it's kind of gross when you actually kiss them.
Obligatory
A problem most of us here will never know.
A bit is a binary diget.
You could do the math with decimal digits, but the convention in Computer Science and Information Theory is to use binary.
The monkeys are getting smarter, they may figure this thing out yet.
We covered (and pretty well debunked) this topic in a story from 21 January. There were better-informed comments than this time around, I think.
You cannot predict anything or do any science with solipsism. brain in a jar, we are a simulation,a re all philosophical dead end which lead to nowhere whatsoever, fast.
Considering that the scientific method was created as a philosophical methodology, I don't find that odd at all. As long as the philosophers keep themselves from going into religious or theological thought then it should be okay (as I wobble my hand and grimace). Remember, there were no scientists prior to the modern concepts of science. Everyone before that was pretty much a philosopher or alchemist of some kind. Heck, even during the Enlightenment period, those who delved into scientific research often spoke on or from philosophical matters.
Speculations by one guy (Chris Fields), on a paper uploaded to a site that anyone can upload to (not peer reviewed), less than a week ago.
That is what Nassim Haramein is studying at resonance.is and on facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/Nassi... . Check out one of his articles here: http://resonance.is/firewalls-... . At the lower end of the cosmological scale lies the Plank Spherical Unit: http://resonance.is/news/quest... . Page 5 of Nassim's Scaling Law pdf has a nice graph of the universe http://hiup.org/wp-content/upl... .
Obviously you hang out with women under 30...
The simulation hypothesis contends that reality is in fact a simulation (most likely a computer simulation), of which we, the simulants are totally unaware.
Ha, when I was a kid in the 60s, my grandmother would always put on fresh lipstick before kissing me.
There is no reason or evidence to suggest that the universe operates in any way that correlates directly to our mathematics
Actually there is a lot of evidence that the universe operates in a way that correlates directly with mathematics. Using our mathematical models of fundamental physics we used them to predict the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, to solve the flaws in the model. Similarly the same principle applied to the discovery of quarks and the W and Z bosons before.
The fact that we can use mathematical models of the fundamental nature of the universe so incredibly successfully to predict new fundamental phenomena that we have never seen before is clear evidence that the universe does work in a manner that correlates with our mathematics. Indeed I would say that this is one of the truly remarkable things about the fundamental nature of the universe: we can construct mathematical models of it which agree perfectly within our, admittedly limited, ability to test them.
Each second we can see another 186 thousand miles, revealing new 'observable universe'.
Actually that is not quite true. The size of the universe that we can see is actually shrinking. This very counterintuitive result is due to the fact that the universe's expansion is accelerating due to Dark Energy. Hence a distant point in space that is currently moving away from us very close to the speed of light today due to the expansion of space will actually be moving away from us faster than the speed of light tomorrow and so will become causally disconnected from us. So with time our horizon will shrink.
In the very distant future the horizon may shrink to the subatomic level and eventually arrive at the planck length itself at which point nobody has a clue as to what will happen since it needs quantum gravity to understand. This is the so-called "Big Rip" end to the universe.
I propose this be known as - (in acknowledgement of the author)
Unified Fields Theory
Actually the accuracy depends on whether Schroedinger's cat lives.
This has been commented on relentlessly, but it doesn't hurt to add another. I have to assume that this summary of the research is missing something critical (though if this is true, then the abstract of the original paper suffers from the same problem). There is no end of arbitrary values picked to come up with the solution they wanted. Why 10 cubic kilometre voxels? That's not a "fundamental" measurement to the universe. Where does 10^25 stars come from? Most current estimates put the number of stars from 10^23 to 10^24, though nobody really knows for sure of course - and even then, estimates vary widely depending on what we exactly consider a star. And naturally, why does even defining the number of stars themselves have anything to do with energy density of the universe? Stars are just arbitrary conglomerations of matter that have nothing to do with "information content" of the universe unless the only items in the universe fundamentally worth counting are stars. I'm stunned a paper like this was published, let alone slashdotted, unless there is much more to the study than immediately meets the eye. Now, if someone did a study on the information density of fundamental positions (i.e.: resolved down to Planck length), with fundamental particles (fermions and bosons), their momentums, and so on, then it would be a study worth doing. Starting with arbitrary human-derived units that have no cosmological significance makes the entire result of the study meaningless.
Or don't lick your lips. Problem solved.
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- Wiki
I come here for the love
Reread the summary. The 10km number is just for the initial example. It later goes on to talk about Plank length and how much energy it would take to store the locations of objects down to a Planck length.
The most interesting thing I get out of this is that the universe apparently fails to use compression to store the locations of things.
Their numbers work when they encode the positions of all the stars in the Universe to the Planck scale. But there's nothing magic about stars: They're just big (and hot), fluffy objects. What about encoding dust outside stars? The positions of the particles that make up the stars? Etc. And it's not at all clear that the position of a _star_ is meaningful on the Planck scale. So this is all just numerology.
We can be pretty bloody sure after all these years in a box it's dead.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Obviously, the Great Simulator has a killer deduplication algorithm with up to 117 orders of magnitude compression. Everything in the known universe resolves to either 117 elements or 36 sub-atomic particles (that we know of), so it just a matter of finding all the element or particle strings in the universe's file layout and replacing most of them with pointers.
Color me unimpressed. While somewhat original the whole approach is completely flawed. There are many more things than just stars in the universe. After all, for all we know, the visible universe only makes up a small portion of all matter.
Except creativity keeps creating more possible states, therefore more information. New words are created from thought alone.
Ha, when I was a kid in the 60s, my grandmother would always put on fresh lipstick before kissing me.
Yuck!
(||) Nehmo (||)
We can be pretty bloody sure after all these years in a box it's dead.
But you didn't "observe" that yet, did you? Thus, his cat is still in superposition.
(||) Nehmo (||)