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It's important to understand when physicists talk about the theoretical perfect preservation of information in these contexts, it's like... if you could pause t
by ztjio 9y ago
It's important to understand when physicists talk about the theoretical perfect preservation of information in these contexts, it's like... if you could pause the universe and evaluate every particle, every "thing," all at once you could understand where it all came from and know the previous step and from there the previous step and so on infinitely until the "beginning." The idea being that the entire universe's "state" if you will, is derived continuously from its origin, observably.
It's not about whether you as a human could use a black hole as a cosmic... blackboard.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoIn an entirely mechanistic nonprobabilistic universe, where state C always follows state B, which always follows state A, etc, then if State X ever equals a prior state, say state B, then the universe enters into an infinite loop. A-B-C-D-X-C-D-X...
- tempestn 9y agoThat's true, but why is it important?
- dotancohen 9y agoNo big bang, no great crunch, Pantera will have more live shows, etc.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoAs constructed, it is true. But important? Probably not. Even if the universe was total mechanistic, and should be described as a series of discrete states, the probability of ever entering into identical states would be very near zero, except perhaps in some hypercooled state, or something. am not sure that the laws o thermodynamics would even allow that to happen. But I am no physicist..just a dude, who had a thought.
- posterboy 9y agoI think most people wouldn't assume a discrete nature of finite state changes as I take from your comment. A cauchy series for example orbits around a limit point. Fixed states would be enumerated by Natural numbers that are extensionally defined in set theory for example as ( 0 ), [ 1, ( 0 ) ], { 2, [ 1, ( 0 ) ] }, ... Be 0 the empty set, then this is the Von Neumann construction [1]. This is a very tangible notion that represents a total order. So a state is a sequence of inputs and the natural number represents the recursion depth of the successor funtion (succ). But the complexity of that function alone is less than NP, so it would not have arbitrary consequences, so cycles would be the least of a problem. A P-adic numbers field Q_p on the other hand isn't even well ordered. Or Pi, it contains many different fixed length versions of itself in its remainder. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_number#Von_Neumann_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_number#Von_Neumann_con... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mealy_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mealy_machine
- thret 9y agoAll of which could be straightforward if the universe is indeed a simulation.
- enkid 9y agoBeing a simulation has nothing to do with it. It's previous states are knowable from current states.