Re: [Patents] Washington Times: Internet Patents Divide Industry

[Carsten Svaneborg <svanebor@mpip-mainz.mpg.de>]

On Sunday 27 July 2003 23:59, Gregory Aharonian wrote:
> but also that information is more fundamental to physical
> reality than energy or matter.

To pull this hot air baloon down to earth. You are guilty of
a mind-projection falacy, unless you are a solipidist.

In classical mechanics you describe everything in terms of
trajectories i.e. position vs time R(t) of a particle.

If I give you the function R(t) of a particle I have given you information.

This is a trivial statement, since it's very difficult to tell people
something that does not contain information except by keeping quiet,
telling people something that is meaningless, on the other hand, is
quite easy except when keeping quitet.

From the curvature of R(t) and knowledge of the mass of the particle
you can now deduce which forces acted on the particle. Alternatively
from knowledge of the force fields you can predict R(t) for future times.

Hence description of any physical system = information, and
the information is encoded in the trajectory. This is not different
than me giving you a bible, which encodes information about
the christian faith, or giving you a virus infection, which carries
a particular DNA sequence. Any description is information.


Laws of nature describes the evolution of the system, i.e. tells
which computation that has to be performed on the description
of the intial state in order for us to predict future states of the
system (or observables thereof).

In this context it is very relevant to look at Quantum Mechanics.
In classical mechanics we do not need to distinguish beween our
description of the postition R(t) and the real particles position.
Because we can rely on the position of always being an observable
even when we are not looking. (google for quantum decoherence)

In QM the path R(t) is replaced by an probability distribution P(r,t)
- the expectation of measuring the particle at time t at the position t,
as given by the norm square of the wave function.

The particle has no position unless it is actually measured, hence
P(r,t) is a formulation of our knowledge, as opposed to the "true" state
of the system, which by the way does not exist unless measured.
If this was wrong then QM would be a hidden-variable theory, which
Aspects experiment of Bells inequality showed it was not.

When you claim information is physical, then you are doing a mind
projection falacy, because you fail to distinguish between our description
of a physical system, and the physical system itself. This is essential
especially in QM where there is no concept of "real system" between
measurements.


> An article in the August 2003 issue of Scientific American, near the
> end, has the following statement:
>     .. that such a final theory [of physical reality] must be
>     concerned not with fields, not even with spacetime, but rather
>     with information exchange among physical processes.
> from "Information in the holographic universe" by Jacob Bekenstein.

FYI Reference:
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000AF072-4891-1F0A-97AE80A84189EEDF

Information is the ultimate stuff of which descriptions are made, but not
the stuff reality is made of (unless you are a fan of The Matrix).
Theoretical physists are suceptible to failing to distinguish between reality
and the model they use to describe reality.

This is assuming a realist philosofical POV.

Btw. the "holographic universe" roughly means that you can describe the
properties black holes in 3D space using only a projection of light rays onto
2D. Which only goes to show how warped the physics of spacetime is.

-- 
  mvh. Carsten Svaneborg