Comment by aesch
1 day ago
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.