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While massively out-weighed by the electrons and baryonic matter, a more interesting conjecture is mass-energy-information equivalence. Do your files themselves

by foxyv 3y ago

While massively out-weighed by the electrons and baryonic matter, a more interesting conjecture is mass-energy-information equivalence. Do your files themselves have mass aside from the electrons and nuclei of the thumb drive? Conservation of information at the quantum level would be an amazing expansion on our current understanding of thermal physics. https://pubs.aip.org/aip/sci/article/2022/9/091111/2849001/A-proposed-experimental-test-for-the-mass-energy https://pubs.aip.org/aip/sci/article/2022/9/091111/2849001/A...

jl6 3y ago
Why would we entertain this conjecture? Why is it plausible in the slightest, since it seems to clash with intuition that information is a completely separate thing to mass-energy?
- cratermoon 3y ago
  > it seems to clash with intuition that information is a completely separate thing to mass-energy? How intuitive is the mass-energy equivalence? Before Einstein's era, people might have said that such an idea clashes with the intuition that is a completely separate thing from energy.
  - jl6 3y ago
    I didn’t say all valid ideas must be intuitive, but that if an idea is not intuitive then we should have some other reason to believe it is worth investigating.
    - foxyv 3y ago
      A few reasons to consider something for study is either existing empirical evidence or internal consistency of a theory. The reason information conservation and energy/mass/information equivalence are interesting is because there is a possibility for such consistency in a few theories. Physicists are always looking for equivalences and conserved quantities. They are the basis for modern physics. It's how we discovered that 3 of the 4 known forces were all based on the same equivalent principle. You find a conserved quantity that unifies the two forces. Possibly one of the greatest feats of this was Maxwell when he unified electrical and magnetic forces by discovering an equivalence between the two that allowed energy to be conserved. This helped us to discover the underlying principles of light itself and describe it as an electromagnetic wave. Information conservation could prove to unify gravity with the remaining forces. Or not! Or it could break them all apart again. That's just what scientific inquiry is all about.
- simcop2387 3y ago
  I don't have the knowledge or smarts to give much detail about it but there's some rather interesting parts of this in Quantum Mechanics and Entropy. Along with that it's also one of the fun little areas of things that may or may not be breaking down with our current models around black-holes and our understanding of gravity. It's an active area of research because of this because it may point to a way to reconcile the incompatibilities between QM and Relativity to get a Grand Unified Theory. I believe Loop Quantum Gravity ends up with effects around this mass-energy-information/entropy equivalence idea as an emergent property of how it's trying to reconcile QM and Relativity.
- MacsHeadroom 3y ago
  >since it seems to clash with intuition Intuition hasn't been a good guide for physics since newton. It's not clear to me that anything physical is separate from the information that describes it though.
  - foxyv 3y ago
    Even Newtonian physics can be very non-intuitive. Especially when things get complicated. A lot of experiments done in introductory physics courses revolve around this. Stuff like a feather and a bowling ball falling in a vacuum and throwing a ball on a merry go round. Rotating reference frames are the worst...
bmacho 3y ago
Information having energy is well known since Boltzmann, as entropy is measured in J/K. I don't think that information is "equivalent" to energy. (Also, I don't think that mass is equivalent to energy either. Sure, if you add energy, you gain mass and vice versa, but since things (for example things with charge) can't be created or destroyed (not even with black holes or antiparticles), talking about the equivalence of energy and mass is total nonsense.)
- petters 3y ago
  I believe things with charge can be both created (electron-positron pair) and destroyed (electron + proton = neutron)
  - bmacho 3y ago
    Yes, you are right, you can destroy an electron with a positron, but then you destroy the positron too, so you have no information about "the energy of the electron". To be more concrete, bmacho equation, E = mc^2 + q*6*10^23 J/e holds for every experiment, every theory (standard model, GR). It states that energy is equivalent to mass and charge.
- foxyv 3y ago
  > Also, I don't think that mass is equivalent to energy either. Unfortunately, your argument here is implausible. There have been tens of thousands of experiments demonstrating mass to energy conversion. It is the basic principle behind nuclear energy production. Mass energy equivalence is necessary to maintain conservation laws and has been proven by empirical observation. The total mass/energy in the system will not change, however the two can be exchanged for each other. > Information having energy is well known since Boltzmann Information having mass/energy has not been proven. There have been no experiments to support this argument. It is merely a theory. > ..as entropy is measured in J/K Entropy is not a conserved quantity since it will increase within a closed system. The Joules/Kelvin unit comes from statistical mechanics where temperature is defined as a change in entropy per increase in total energy. The entropy used in information theory is different, although related. Entropy in information theory is measured in bits.
cwmma 3y ago
if this was true wouldn't it imply that you could tell the difference between random and encrypted data? And if you ascribed meaning to random data it would gain weight...
- foxyv 3y ago
  > if this was true wouldn't it imply that you could tell the difference between random and encrypted data? Possibly. > And if you ascribed meaning to random data it would gain weight... You would have to create a dictionary with that meaning which would be more information that would add that theorized weight. This is a common problem in compression.
  - cwmma 3y ago
    but if information alone is weight then creating that dictionary separately would add to the weight of the exact order of the random data now has meaning.
    - foxyv 3y ago
      When you assign a meaning to something, you are merely establishing a relationship between two systems which is information itself. It does not add information to either of the two systems. It merely creates third system with it's own information. For instance, if you have the state "H" and want to add a meaning to it "High Temperature" you need to create a third piece of information "H" -> "High Temperature" You are not changing the information in "H" or "High Temperature" you are merely creating a third piece of information which is the lambda.
      - cwmma 3y ago
        but isn't that like...everything the only way a hard drive has information is because though language and other technical specs we assign meaning to the things on the hard drive?
        3y ago
hgsgm 3y ago
Does "my file" have more information than a cleared drive?
- opwieurposiu 3y ago
  The information content of a file is approximated by it's compressed size. If you have a 1Gb file of all zeros or all ones it will compress down to almost nothing, but a 1Gb file of random numbers will hardly compress at all.
- foxyv 3y ago
  We don't know. I wonder if the universe uses compression on stuff like that? It's a funny idea, but if information actually is mass/energy, you could measure that mass/energy, and if it was different for the cleared drive... Then you could prove that the universe is self-compressing. That would be a bit mind blowing. A lot of "Ifs" though.

by foxyv 3y ago

jl6 3y ago

Why would we entertain this conjecture? Why is it plausible in the slightest, since it seems to clash with intuition that information is a completely separate thing to mass-energy?

cratermoon 3y ago
> it seems to clash with intuition that information is a completely separate thing to mass-energy? How intuitive is the mass-energy equivalence? Before Einstein's era, people might have said that such an idea clashes with the intuition that is a completely separate thing from energy.
- jl6 3y ago
  I didn’t say all valid ideas must be intuitive, but that if an idea is not intuitive then we should have some other reason to believe it is worth investigating.
  - foxyv 3y ago
    A few reasons to consider something for study is either existing empirical evidence or internal consistency of a theory. The reason information conservation and energy/mass/information equivalence are interesting is because there is a possibility for such consistency in a few theories. Physicists are always looking for equivalences and conserved quantities. They are the basis for modern physics. It's how we discovered that 3 of the 4 known forces were all based on the same equivalent principle. You find a conserved quantity that unifies the two forces. Possibly one of the greatest feats of this was Maxwell when he unified electrical and magnetic forces by discovering an equivalence between the two that allowed energy to be conserved. This helped us to discover the underlying principles of light itself and describe it as an electromagnetic wave. Information conservation could prove to unify gravity with the remaining forces. Or not! Or it could break them all apart again. That's just what scientific inquiry is all about.
simcop2387 3y ago
I don't have the knowledge or smarts to give much detail about it but there's some rather interesting parts of this in Quantum Mechanics and Entropy. Along with that it's also one of the fun little areas of things that may or may not be breaking down with our current models around black-holes and our understanding of gravity. It's an active area of research because of this because it may point to a way to reconcile the incompatibilities between QM and Relativity to get a Grand Unified Theory. I believe Loop Quantum Gravity ends up with effects around this mass-energy-information/entropy equivalence idea as an emergent property of how it's trying to reconcile QM and Relativity.
MacsHeadroom 3y ago
>since it seems to clash with intuition Intuition hasn't been a good guide for physics since newton. It's not clear to me that anything physical is separate from the information that describes it though.
- foxyv 3y ago
  Even Newtonian physics can be very non-intuitive. Especially when things get complicated. A lot of experiments done in introductory physics courses revolve around this. Stuff like a feather and a bowling ball falling in a vacuum and throwing a ball on a merry go round. Rotating reference frames are the worst...

bmacho 3y ago

Information having energy is well known since Boltzmann, as entropy is measured in J/K. I don't think that information is "equivalent" to energy. (Also, I don't think that mass is equivalent to energy either. Sure, if you add energy, you gain mass and vice versa, but since things (for example things with charge) can't be created or destroyed (not even with black holes or antiparticles), talking about the equivalence of energy and mass is total nonsense.)

petters 3y ago
I believe things with charge can be both created (electron-positron pair) and destroyed (electron + proton = neutron)
- bmacho 3y ago
  Yes, you are right, you can destroy an electron with a positron, but then you destroy the positron too, so you have no information about "the energy of the electron". To be more concrete, bmacho equation, E = mc^2 + q*6*10^23 J/e holds for every experiment, every theory (standard model, GR). It states that energy is equivalent to mass and charge.
foxyv 3y ago
> Also, I don't think that mass is equivalent to energy either. Unfortunately, your argument here is implausible. There have been tens of thousands of experiments demonstrating mass to energy conversion. It is the basic principle behind nuclear energy production. Mass energy equivalence is necessary to maintain conservation laws and has been proven by empirical observation. The total mass/energy in the system will not change, however the two can be exchanged for each other. > Information having energy is well known since Boltzmann Information having mass/energy has not been proven. There have been no experiments to support this argument. It is merely a theory. > ..as entropy is measured in J/K Entropy is not a conserved quantity since it will increase within a closed system. The Joules/Kelvin unit comes from statistical mechanics where temperature is defined as a change in entropy per increase in total energy. The entropy used in information theory is different, although related. Entropy in information theory is measured in bits.

cwmma 3y ago

if this was true wouldn't it imply that you could tell the difference between random and encrypted data? And if you ascribed meaning to random data it would gain weight...

foxyv 3y ago
> if this was true wouldn't it imply that you could tell the difference between random and encrypted data? Possibly. > And if you ascribed meaning to random data it would gain weight... You would have to create a dictionary with that meaning which would be more information that would add that theorized weight. This is a common problem in compression.
- cwmma 3y ago
  but if information alone is weight then creating that dictionary separately would add to the weight of the exact order of the random data now has meaning.
  - foxyv 3y ago
    When you assign a meaning to something, you are merely establishing a relationship between two systems which is information itself. It does not add information to either of the two systems. It merely creates third system with it's own information. For instance, if you have the state "H" and want to add a meaning to it "High Temperature" you need to create a third piece of information "H" -> "High Temperature" You are not changing the information in "H" or "High Temperature" you are merely creating a third piece of information which is the lambda.
    - cwmma 3y ago
      but isn't that like...everything the only way a hard drive has information is because though language and other technical specs we assign meaning to the things on the hard drive?
      - 3y ago

hgsgm 3y ago

Does "my file" have more information than a cleared drive?

opwieurposiu 3y ago
The information content of a file is approximated by it's compressed size. If you have a 1Gb file of all zeros or all ones it will compress down to almost nothing, but a 1Gb file of random numbers will hardly compress at all.
foxyv 3y ago
We don't know. I wonder if the universe uses compression on stuff like that? It's a funny idea, but if information actually is mass/energy, you could measure that mass/energy, and if it was different for the cleared drive... Then you could prove that the universe is self-compressing. That would be a bit mind blowing. A lot of "Ifs" though.