3 ms·

Fascinating. I know the work these physicists are doing is vastly more complex and involved, but I can't help but draw comparison to my own musings. I've been

by parksy 7y ago

Fascinating. I know the work these physicists are doing is vastly more complex and involved, but I can't help but draw comparison to my own musings. I've been chipping away at various angles of information theory as a hobby for a few years now, conceptually for me a black hole in the traditional sense is like compressing random bits to a single zero or one - there'd be no way of getting information back out in the original order. Encoding a higher dimensional representation holographically would be like having a side channel of information I guess, so you could have the 0 or 1 as the 'black hole' but still can reference external state data to reconstitute meaning from it. Entropy is preserved, and laws of maths and physics are no longer being broken. Say, I can divide a sequence of bits by 2 if they're even, or add one then divide by two if they're odd, repeatedly until the result is 1 (after which the sequence repeats indefinitely, but we can stop at 1 - similar but different to the collatz conjecture). If I know the sequence of operations I can rebuild the original data, but encoding that sequence of operations is the exact same amount of information as the original sequence (in my tests at least). I'm kind of comforted by the fact that it may turn out black holes aren't destroying information, merely transforming it.

mjevans 7y ago
The reduction of information aspect you suggest contradicts one of the key elements outlined in the article (the QM view that information might be transformed (combined/processed) but never removed). I offer my own, within this realm of discussion, layman's perspective that a black hole might be metaphorically similar to an above ground swimming pool with a (small) hole in the side, within a still larger pool. If there is an orderly structure within the small pool the flow will remove structured information from within and spray it back out. Following the above metaphore and the impression the article gave me: a black hole does something similar but in a more fourth-dimensional hysteresis format. Over time the energy and "information" contained within (or released out as other forms of energy) is observation-ally constant. This would be a lot more like the way a moon can create tides that pull water in and out of a bay. While I would also love for science fiction toys like the Portal Gun (or other wormholes/gateways) to be a reality, I really doubt they're actually possible and even if they are this would probably be as close to realizing them as discovering the principles of electricity were to creating the microprocessor.
- parksy 7y ago
  Can you point out specifically what I said that contradicts, not trying to be obtuse but I want to reassess my thinking. The reduction of information example I thought agreed with the article, because traditionally (or in other words in layman's understanding) a black hole seems to have been represented as thing that removes information from the universe, which would be like taking a sequence of binary and reducing it to a 1 or 0 through some hidden methods. You'd never be able to get back the original data - unless you had some encoding of the steps taken to reduce, i.e. through a transformation. Genuinely I'm just not quite sure which bit of my analogy contradicts the article, and perhaps I've just not been clear enough in what I am writing, but I appreciate your comment in any regards.
  - qubex 7y ago
    Basically quantum theory forbids hashing (because it’s an irreversible form of information loss) — but what you are proposing is not a hash since it produces a stream of bits which re-encode the original string (simply in a different form).
mycall 7y ago
> is like compressing random bits to a single zero or one - there'd be no way of getting information back out in the original order. This is how modulus works for hashing. The number of turns around a circle is lost but is computationally accurate and well-formed.
- parksy 7y ago
  My understanding previously was that black holes are hashing the universe in a way, irretrievably reducing information to a more fundamental and irreversible state, while this article implies that actually, they're merely transforming the information and we have the ability to read a map (holographic extra-dimensional information from the emitted radiation) to resequence at least some of that information. Interesting to think about.

by parksy 7y ago

mjevans 7y ago

The reduction of information aspect you suggest contradicts one of the key elements outlined in the article (the QM view that information might be transformed (combined/processed) but never removed). I offer my own, within this realm of discussion, layman's perspective that a black hole might be metaphorically similar to an above ground swimming pool with a (small) hole in the side, within a still larger pool. If there is an orderly structure within the small pool the flow will remove structured information from within and spray it back out. Following the above metaphore and the impression the article gave me: a black hole does something similar but in a more fourth-dimensional hysteresis format. Over time the energy and "information" contained within (or released out as other forms of energy) is observation-ally constant. This would be a lot more like the way a moon can create tides that pull water in and out of a bay. While I would also love for science fiction toys like the Portal Gun (or other wormholes/gateways) to be a reality, I really doubt they're actually possible and even if they are this would probably be as close to realizing them as discovering the principles of electricity were to creating the microprocessor.

parksy 7y ago
Can you point out specifically what I said that contradicts, not trying to be obtuse but I want to reassess my thinking. The reduction of information example I thought agreed with the article, because traditionally (or in other words in layman's understanding) a black hole seems to have been represented as thing that removes information from the universe, which would be like taking a sequence of binary and reducing it to a 1 or 0 through some hidden methods. You'd never be able to get back the original data - unless you had some encoding of the steps taken to reduce, i.e. through a transformation. Genuinely I'm just not quite sure which bit of my analogy contradicts the article, and perhaps I've just not been clear enough in what I am writing, but I appreciate your comment in any regards.
- qubex 7y ago
  Basically quantum theory forbids hashing (because it’s an irreversible form of information loss) — but what you are proposing is not a hash since it produces a stream of bits which re-encode the original string (simply in a different form).

mycall 7y ago

> is like compressing random bits to a single zero or one - there'd be no way of getting information back out in the original order. This is how modulus works for hashing. The number of turns around a circle is lost but is computationally accurate and well-formed.

parksy 7y ago
My understanding previously was that black holes are hashing the universe in a way, irretrievably reducing information to a more fundamental and irreversible state, while this article implies that actually, they're merely transforming the information and we have the ability to read a map (holographic extra-dimensional information from the emitted radiation) to resequence at least some of that information. Interesting to think about.