Information

I have written a few notes in this blog with this name. It is a favourite topic of mine, given that I studied Communications Engineering in the late sixties and early seventies.

Now I want to expand my views on Lorenzo Maccone's recent paper commented here earlier.

Information is the set of records.

There, plain and simple. If those records are erased, Information is lost. Energy is conserved, Information is not. They are two different parts on our Universe, and maybe in all imaginable universes.

Spacetime on the other hand has an older place in Physics. Since Einstein's 1915 General Relativity paper, this entitiy has a well established place in the mathematics of Physics. These equations, or programs, as maybe Stephen Wolfram would prefer to consider them, give a precise relation. On the one hand of the equation we have spacetime, on the other energymomentum.

If I would put Information somewhere in those equations, I will be more tempted to put it on the spacetime side. In an even more daring proposal I will put Information above both sides of the equation!

The equation is the set of records.

As John Archibald Wheeler used to say, matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move. I say, without records those two cannot talk.

Records are physical marks on spacetime, give me a spacetime event and there is a set of records. The value of the electron spinor, the photon four vector, and so on and so forth. I have no idea how those records got there, but by golly they are there!