Comment by bix6
2 months ago
“If the universe is information at play”
I’ve thought of it more as energy at play but I like this perspective as well.
What can I dream up next is also fascinating as this current science / tech worldview feels like it will persist forever but surely it will be overshadowed at some point just as other paradigms before it have been.
Energy is already abstract term. Information is every more abstract term. Earlier we had the law "Entropy always increases". Now we have a corresponding law with regard to Information i.e. "Complexity always increases."
Complexity and Gravity - Leonard Susskind
https://youtu.be/6OXdhV5BOcY?t=3026
My conjecture is as we peel back the layers of onion beyond information, we will have another concept (lets call it Mu) and its corresponding law i.e (Mu-entropy always increases)
Energy comes from field excitation. Fields and their interactions are more fundamental, but then again it's all a physics abstraction of whatever the fundamental stuff actually is.
Are we entirely sure that energy and information aren't the same thing, or if they aren't the same thing they are both highly overlapping echoes of some more fundamental concept? Or maybe they are two sides of the same coin?
They are related by Landauer's Principle: E=k×T×ln(2), where E is the energy required to erase 1 bit of information, k is the Boltzmann constant, and T is the temperature of the system storing that 1 bit of information.
Information is physical. It is inextricably tied to the physical degrees of freedom of the system storing it. Per Landauer's Principle, erasing information is an irreversible process that increases the entropy of the environment, and this increase in entropy is the dissipation of energy. With that in mind, I would argue that you are correct, energy and information are in fact two sides of the same coin.
Or maybe Energy is emergent from information? like the russian dolls, where the outer dollar is emergent from the inner doll. Just as flux of light flows from the source outwards.
Information is more fundamental than energy. Maxwells demon and all.
I don't think you can have information without energy and information will come with energy
Landauer's principle?
The universal speed limit also applies to information first and foremost. You can even collapse the wavefunction of some entangled particles and the universe will let that happen instantaneously across a distance… universe doesn’t care, no information is transmitted.