Notes for a Theory of Information in Physics

I feel at home with these young people now. When I was in graduate school, my peers hardly talked about Information. Statistical Mechanics was the only place; there was an exception though: Prof. Luis de la Peña. At UNAM he has tried for over thirty years now to understand Quantum Mechanics as some sort of statistical description of motion.

After studying Communications Theory at ESIME, I switched to Physics, and felt that the role of Information in Physics was not clear. I decided a course of action, first learn the craft, then propose a New Kind of Science (NKS).

I am sixty years old now, and nobody has seen my NKS. My situation now is abysmal, Stephen Wolfram stole the name!

I'm kidding, Wolfram did everything on his own. He doesn't even know my idea. I presented the idea once many years ago to a group of Physics students in Puebla, Mexico. Now one of them, Jaime Díaz, is dead.

I told them that all matter evolved, not only organic, and that Information was the script it followed. The script and the matter are intimately linked, it from bit, as Prof. Wheeler, so aptly put it.

Later on in life, I learned that Maturana and Varela, had created the idea of autopoiesis.

OK, things seem to finally have come down in place. This is my first try at a synthesis of half baked ideas, cooked for well over forty years.

I start with Erik Peter Verlinde.

He looks nice, doesn't he?

I already wrote a few notes on the December revolution. There is much more I haven't had time to read, even less comment on. I read his paper, and Lee Smolin's follow up, incorporating the work of my much admired Jerzy Plebanski.

I am not in a hurry, maybe I should be, I am not getting any younger; anyway. I will reminisce about Jerzy.

I got to CINVESTAV in 1971. He wasn't there, after having being the director of the Physics Department, he went back to his country, Poland. I saw all those beautiful green notebooks on spinors and what not. The library was filled with his copious production. We didn't have a good general relativist in house; only his students were there, and they were not very well known. I remember, Prof. Rodrigo Pellicer, that had studied at ESIME like me; but the place was not a hotbed of mathematical physics by any stretch of the imagination. We got Prof. Ralph Morganstern, that worked in Brans-Dicke Theory, but he was all alone, I guess alone in more than one way. He eventually left Mexico, and I have lost his trace.

After several years at UCSB I went back to Mexico, and Jerzy was about to come back. They didn't hire me at the Physics Department, because I was still working on my PhD thesis with Bob Sugar. I got a job at the University of Puebla, and eventually became the Academic Secretary of the undergraduate physics program there. We had now some good general relativists from CINVESTAV, Profs. Gerardo Torres del Castillo, and Humberto Salazar. It was through them that Jerzy received an invitation to give a seminar at Puebla. Jerzy, my wife and I, went to eat out afterwards. I forgot who else went with us; but what I haven't forgotten was a moment in our conversation, when he told us about his Jewish friends in Warsaw that died at the hands of the Nazis; his beautiful light eyes teared up.

In 1977 he had written an important paper:

J. Plebanski, On The Separation Of Einsteinian Substructures, J. Math. Phys.18: 2511- 2520, 1977

In that paper he laid one of the foundations for what may become the Theory of Quantum Gravity.

Einstein worked with Infeld, and Infeld with Plebanski.

Plebanski had several Mexican students, unfortunately I was not one of them. One was Sabás Alarcón Gutiérrez, the Sabas I put in my first Short Story in this blog. I have lost track of Sabas, if we don't organize the search and rescue mission I describe in that story, we may never save Sabas. He is somewhere in Sonora or Sinaloa, just like Cesárea Tinajero, in the Savage Detectives.

Nowadays then, we seem to be close to a Quantum Theory of Gravity based on the insights of people younger than me, like Verlinde and Smolin.

Fortunately for my life project, those insights involve a new role for Information in the fabric of space time.

What follows is my understanding of the Nature of Information.

In the beginning nothing. Or if there was something, I don't know what it was. Then boom; there it is. I don't know where it came from, but there it was. No electron, no quark, no photon, no string, no preon: nothing.

By the way I had the fortune to meet Hidezumi Terazawa, a preon proponent. He was a friend of Jean Pestieu, that taught at CINVESTAV, while I was there. Prof. Terazawa also taught us his ideas on preons on visits to Mexico while I was at Puebla.

Information was not there either.

The problem then is to give a half baked idea of what Information is.

Here it goes:

From Terazawa pregeometry we have:

"Our general expectation is the following: under certain physical conditions, the space-time metric which is a composite of the fundamental matters would dissociate into its constituent matters, just as ordinary objects do."



Unlike Terazawa, I want to assume that before the Big Bang, there was nothing. My problem then is to figure out where the Laws of Physics come from?

This is the ultimate bootstrap. We don't even have Information. Information is an emergent property of the Universe.

In the beginning was the vacuum state. The set with nothing in it.

Information in this model is like the membrane in a living cell, and all the instructions inside that the parts use to build another copy of itself. Autopoeitic Universe. Information tells matter how to move, and matter tells Information how to evolve.

Verlinde, and all the priors that he may not be aware of, because all this was unwelcome physics, like Terazawa's pregeometry, and Erik is too young to know; has opened Pandora's box.

Gravity as emergent spacetime, as some kind of entropic force. Whatever that means.

More to come.