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Comment by doctoboggan | Hacker News Reader

I love reading about these things. It seems like information is slowly being raised to the same level as energy and matter (All being different ways to look at the same phenomenon)

The universe does care about preserving information, and there are physical limits on it's propagation and consumption. This is similar to formalizing energy as a concept, which can manifest itself in many different ways (kinetic, potential, radiation, etc) Once we wrapped it up in a concept we were able to reason about it in a more abstract way. The same process is now happening with the concept of information. This is leading to breakthroughs in computing (ML, pattern recognition, etc) and physics. I am excited for the future of information theory.

</armchair physicist>

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> It seems like information is slowly being raised to the same level as energy and matter

Indeed, the as-of-yet unsolved Black hole information paradox [1] deals with conservation of information. Since discovery that Hawking radiation [2] carries no information theoretical phisicists are looking for ways to reconcile it with 'no-hair theorem' [3] which claims no discernable information is ever emmitted from beyond event horizon, yet information apparently is input into the black hole as more matter falls into it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hair_theorem

Totally with you. I'm currently fascinated by cryptography and the encoding of value. It seems to me that alot of what we do is in some way encoding value, from a less scarce form to a more scarce form, and the highest encoding of value is to be found in money. Bitcoin for example, is a conversion between alot of energy input and a little bit of information output, I wonder what different ways exist to reason about this exchange.

Reminds me of a recent throwaway tweet of mine - What if reality is a blockchain?

I recently posted a writeup of an idea I had kicking around for a while, which also has some fun similarities re many worlds interpretation. Kind of makes one wish one was a quantum physicist :).

edit: http://pointfree.uk

You very well may be one, if it gets that far. I built this: https://www.stackmonkey.com/. Check out the demos and then think about your stuff on top of that. That's what I've been thinking about recently.

NN Taleb's next book is going to be about information theory (he calls it 'the mother discipline').

> It seems like information is slowly being raised to the same level as energy and matter

Yes. It turns out there's a reason for this. See:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf

Take a look at David Deutsch's work on quantum mechanics, information theory, quantum computing, etc. I especially like http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563

Cool stuff.

(Related, possibly, is the concept that QM is simply probability with ranges from [-1,1] instead of the traditional [0,1]: Negative probabilities imply things that happen that we cannot measure. Or something like that, it's been a while.)

(Now if only I could find that wicked cool graphic showing the hierarchy of mathematics (ZFC or something near the bottom) and physics (QM and GR, sitting atop currently irreconcilable branches of math)....)

I found the diagram you mentioned:

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lil7n0uiEl1qfjvexo1_500.pn...

The original source of this diagram: http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9704009

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