Ask A Genius 391 – Return of the Translation of Information Problem: Physics & Mathematics, Topology & Geometry, Representation & Universe, and Armature & Physical Framework
September 23, 2018
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This leads to question with regards to IC. What do particular sizes of objects mean over time in terms of information and information process? Also, why those types of information processing? As well, how do they relate to one another?
Rick Rosner: The answer to the first question is “I don’t know.” The various sizes of objects in the universe and the types of information is also an “I don’t know.” I can expand on that.
The idea of orange or the idea of an orange the fruit. I do not know what that would look like informationally. It is some kind of combination between localized and distributed information but it is nowhere near as localized as the information in a computer – where things are described by very specific lines of code.
But I do not know that much about coding, so, maybe, there are less localized forms of characterizing objects and stuff.
Jacobsen: If you take a simple commutative math arithmetic, there are few variations on the representation of the information; but if you take Algebra, there are more ways to represent the information.
I suspect that there are different types of information that can arise that can represent different types of processing but represent the same information.
Rosner: I half agree with you. I think the same information can be represented in a bunch of different ways. But I don’t think you can have universes that are that much different in terms of basic structure, unless you engineer some universe.
I think the physics of information is going to be the same from the universe to another universe.
Jacobsen: Think about a cube or a Moebius Strip, if you look at them from different angles, you can get a similar representation.
Rosner: It may be possible to drag enough matter around to allow wormholes to allow faster-than-light. It is where you connect two distant parts of the universe. You might be able to bend space enough to do that.
That space would have a different topology than a universe without a wormhole. But the physics that lets you do it would be the same in both universes, donut universes and regular universes.
I think the rules would stay the same. It is just what you can do with them and what might arise from them, which might be different but the physics will be probably the same.
Jacobsen: I like that idea. It leads to segmentation for me, three – actually four. In one, you have the physics, the math of it. You have the topology and the geometry of it. Then you have the representation of it, the information. Then you have the armature, the physical structure from which the stuff is allowed to exist in the first place.
The stuff that you hadn’t mentioned before. The principles of existence but represented as the math or as the physics. That’s interesting. Because you should be able to translate the rules or the physics into the topology into the representation and that into the armature.
You should have a basic isomorphism there. However, that should not make them necessarily the same in scale or in purpose.
Rosner: I still think the most basic or most approachable, or most appropriate geometric representation of the information is a 3-dimensional information map that looks like the universe. You should be able to represent that in something like a line of code.
But the most appropriate form is the visual form. The information transmittal of the universe is largely visual. Photons transmit visual information. Neutrinos do that, too; except, they make everything seethrough because they can peer through anything.
You have the universe constantly transmitting images of itself to every other part of itself. It is a very visual thing. You mentioned arithmetic. But it is not simple encoding that informationally into/experientially into an information processing system.
It wouldn’t be a matter of stating a couple rules. It would be deeply rooted in the history of the information space, or the mind, of the universe that would encode based on vast experience of how counting and numbers work – how the Unitary Principle works. That things have oneness.
A thing that is a thing is one thing and then you can combine them and then have two things. It seems super simple because we are used to it. But building a system that truly understands that, it is not as simple as that.
Jacobsen: Given those particular types of structures and representations of information, why those structures and representations of information?
Rosner: That is asking a whole bunch of different questions. Ultimately, that boils down to why the universe is the universe and why it looks the way it looks, and is there another way for a universe to look and work.
You can answer it bit-by-bit. 3-dimensionality is the best and, perhaps, the only marriage between spatial flexibility and informational compactness. That you can do a lot in 3 dimensions.
In 2 dimensions, you cannot do that much because a line is a wall. You can’t have two lines; they can’t get past each other if they are going in different directions. In 3-dimensions, you can have a number of lines going in all sorts of different directions without being stopped by all sorts of other lines.
It is an unlimited number, not infinite. 3-dimensions are simple to describe, to characterize, informationally; the more dimensions you have then the more information you need to describe the space itself and the things in space.
I think there is probably some kind of information efficient push to go with the simplest flexible number of dimensions, which is probably 3. Why do you need neutrinos and photons as the two different long-distance particles? Why do neutrinos have to have a little bit of mass? These are things that are way, way ahead of things of where we are now?
Jacobsen: Why those particular relationships? Why not others? It is a deeper question.
Rosner: Why these things? Does it have a choice?
Jacobsen: It begs the question of what you mean by “choice.”
Rosner: Can you have a universe with 4 spatial dimensions? Can you have a universe with any dimensions but some other arrangement of information? Because dimensions are an arbitrary construct that works very well, where a lot of stuff that is, apparently, close to you based on how it appears to you visually and other interactions appears larger than something that is distant.
In terms of the universe, something that is way distant from you; it is partially a reflection of less information in common with that thing. Although, that also means the less information you have in common.
There is something in Linear Algebra – maybe – called the Kernel. It is what you can boil a matrix down to; this isn’t going to be helpful, but the less information something has in common with you – then the more different distant points there can be of things that have only 20% information in common with you.
Because there are a lot of ways to sample 20%. You would expect a universe that gets bigger in diameter, as the diameter increases, as distances increase, then you would suspect the circumference or the amount of different possible places at a given distance to increase with distance.
Because there are more and more ways to not have a lot of different information in common. I would guess the dimensionality of the universe – that it has dimensions – is based on rules of information and freedom of information to vary from point to point. That’s not too clear. But anyway!
Let me go back to filamentary nets, you have things with tight weaves like sweaters or carpets or fussy needlepoint dealies, but then you have loose nets like fishnet stockings or like those bags that the baby oranges come in.
So, I imagine that the filamentary structure of the universe is a bunch of intertwined but only loosely connected loose nets or widely spaced nets. That you can pull on one net without having to pull on that entire area of the universe.
Because, I think, the things that function as memories or the apps that aren’t always on and fade away to the edges of the universe; I see the edge of the universe being hot and messy and primordial and lacking a lot of organization because it is close to an apparent T=0. It is hot and chaotic, like the beginning of the Big Bang universe.
But within the hot chaos are volumes of collapsed matter, that function as memory and are, to some extent, shielded from the hot chaos by them being collapsed into themselves by them being down their own gravitational wells.
So, it is a hot broth with lots of tight nuggets in it. The tight nuggets are connected via filaments to a bunch of stuff including the active center. If enough stuff gets lit up, it lights up these certain concentrated areas and then turns them into active galaxies and, maybe, larger sections than galaxies.
Then they bubble out of the primordial chaos. They do not have to bubble up to the active center; they just have to bubble up enough that they are within the fringe of the active region of the universe.
It doesn’t take much of a pull or much deformation of the overall structure of space to pull up memories because the associational nets, the filaments, can be pulled. You can pull on stuff. Say you’ve got a thousand, roughly, different nets, you can pull on the corner of one net without pulling, necessarily, all the nearby collapsed areas along with it.
Because most of the nearby collapsed areas are parts of nets that formed at different times. So, the nets aren’t strongly tied to each other. But you can tug on one region and then pull it up without ripping a hole or deforming space badly. You don’t have to pull them that far. Only pulling them, maybe, T=way-close-to-0 to T=10%-apparent-age-of-the-universe; if they stay lit over time, and prove useful, they rise to T=20%-apparent-age-of-the-universe.
It gives you time. Because this would take billions of years for the universe to reconfigure and for new filaments to form. That is the whole deal there. I think that might be enough of a mechanism.
I think we’re getting close enough to a program that would allow actual physics to be done by, maybe, people who know more physics or, maybe, even us if we’re dogged and intrepid enough.
Maybe.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
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Rick Rosner 