“= everything flows”, Eraclitus, (Ephesus, 535-475 B.C.). If really in Nature everything changes and progresses, then at least two questions arise: 1) how can be these changes entropic but nonetheless somehow predictable without risk of oxymoronic behavior; 2) how can Science conform itself to follow this requirement of the Nature. To attempt an answer to these questions, the present paper introduces an ab initio theoretical model aimed to show that physical information is actually nothing else but straightforward quantum and relativistic implication of the concept of evolution.
“= everything flows”, Eraclitus, (Ephesus, 535-475 B.C.). If really in Nature everything changes and progresses, then at least two questions arise: 1) how can be these changes entropic but nonetheless somehow predictable without risk of oxymoronic behavior; 2) how can Science conform itself to follow this requirement of the Nature. To attempt an answer to these questions, the present paper introduces an ab initio theoretical model aimed to show that physical information is actually nothing else but straightforward quantum and relativistic implication of the concept of evolution.
The twentieth century has seen two major revolutions in our theories of physics concerning nature, and these have made us change many of our concepts about the terms in which nature can be described. The new theories born in these revolutions are the theory of relativity and of quantum mechanics. The biological sciences had their revolutions in the nineteenth century, and while remarkable progress has been made since, nothing comparable to that upheaval has occurred in this century. Of the two massive changes in the concepts of the physical sciences, we can discuss but one here. [excerpt]
There are several links between information theory — between »information as such« whatever that might mean — and the foundations of nature, i e, basic physics. Well, since physics a science still evolving (despite propositions that »the end of science« now in sight), some of the links between information and physics are hypothetical. One linkage fairly obvious — thermodynamics depends upon entropy or some measure of order or disorder, and that clearly has something to do with information. The other possible relationship might be between the uncertainty that a key characteristic of quantum mechanics. We can never know everything on the quantum scale; the Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells that the more information we gain in one direction the less we know in another. If we, on that scale, obtain certainty as to one factor, then another will stay entirely undecided — try to affix a position to a quantum particle, and the momentum will be out of bounds entirely. (This the established dogma currently, though there are some deviating ideas.1) Then the question arises: who does the actual measuring, with what — what particles, at what level, are involved in this act of, as it pronounced, forcing the wave function to collapse? This wave function is the indeterminate particle: the various statistics describing the probabilities that the particle (which simultaneously takes on aspects of a wave) may be in one state or another. We will now attempt to discuss these different — or are they really different? — interdependencies, starting with black holes.
Information is treated by classical physics, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics as an epistemic variable, with no significance in their mathematical models. All currently accepted conceptions of information and entropy are subjective, observer-related. We have proposed (Ospino 2026) considering information as an ontic category with energy equivalence and energetic meaningfulness, and making it part of the complete balance of physical evolution. The history of science is the history of useful but incomplete models derived under the reliance of approximations and simplifications. Every such model was contemporarily considered complete until the contrary fact was demonstrated. Unitarity and determinism are generally regarded as a complete understanding of physical evolution. The empirical success and practical usefulness of such assumptions is undeniable, as every model before was also for a certain time, until it was not. Motivated by the information-energy equivalence (Landauer, Vopson), and by the possibility of resolving some open questions not explainable under the current understanding, we introduced ontic information into consideration, and we are presenting here some derived conclusions for further analysis and discussion. We emphasize that the epistemic nature of information and entropy as per Shannon and von Neumann (and related approaches) needs to be consequently updated with the ontic understanding, or else the analysis will be flawed when using epistemic approaches. Also, since unitarity is the concept in question here, we rely on acceptance, for the purpose of the discussion, that unitarity could be incomplete.
www.philipgoyal.org Quantum theory is an extraordinarily successful physical theory. But what does it mean? What implications does it have for the mechanical conception of Nature that underlies classical physics? Remarkably, some eighty years after the creation of quantum theory, we still lack clear answers to these questions. In this paper, we discuss the nature of the obstacles that stand in our way, and describe recent work to overcome them by attempting to reconstruct the mathematics of quantum theory from a small number of simple physical ideas.