Thursday 30 January 2020

entropy - What is information?


We're all familiar with basic tenets such as "information cannot be transmitted faster than light" and ideas such as information conservation in scenarios like Hawking radiation (and in general, obviously). The Holographic Principle says, loosely, that information about a volume of space is encoded on its two-dimensional surface in Planck-sized bits.


In all these contexts, I can take "information" to mean predictive or postdictive capability, i.e. information is what enables us to state what the outcome of a measurement was or will be (locally). But what is information, exactly? Do we have any kind of microscopic description of it? Is it just a concept and, if so, how can we talk about transmitting it?


I suspect this is probably as unanswerable as what constitutes an observer/measurement for wave function collapse, but I'd love to know if we have any formulation of what information is made of, so to speak. If I'm talking nonsense, as I suspect I may be, feel free to point this out.




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