Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There was one session maybe a month or two ago or even a few weeks ago. At one point, you were talking about representing information and having something like a rock or something. You crack it with a hammer, and the rock breaks open. The force of the hammer, the swing of the hammer, the structures, the breaking apart, and all the Brownian motion in there, like, that’s all an informational process. So something sparked the idea that we’re having quite a nuanced thought about information there, where it’s not highly well… 

Rick Rosner: My thought about it was back then, but my thought about it now is that we don’t have a good picture of the role of information in the existence of anything and the unfolding of anything. And you and I have been talking for ten years now about informational cosmology—that the universe, matter, space, and time are the embodiment of information in some information processing system that’s processing information about something else altogether, another universe, another part of the universe. 

However, the mathematical definition of information is only 76 years old. Shannon came up with it in 1948. We don’t have good ideas about where the information in the universe is, what it is, and what’s not information. I’ve talked about how most of the interactions inside a star don’t count as information because no record of them survives. There’s only an implicit record of many interactions happening every second inside a star because a star weighs 200,000 times as much as Earth. At least at the center of the star, you’ve got tens of thousands of Earth masses of largely hydrogen nuclei—well, freaking protons—swirling around and eventually fusing into deuterium. But none of these photon exchanges at the center of a star leave a record. 

Because heat is exchanged, vast heat. But it’s all lost in a swirl of other interactions. How far an average photon travels at the center of a star is probably less than a centimetre. It’s emitted and absorbed within a billionth of a second, less than a trillionth. And even the rest of the stars, there’s a bunch of heat exchanges, photon exchanges that leave no record. The only photons that have a chance of leaving an actual record are the ones that make it out of the star’s surface. So we have no… Nobody talks about this, but I don’t read widely in physics. Most of the interactions in the universe don’t leave a record. But that’s one aspect of our lack of understanding of how information works. You talked about splitting open the rock, so we have a metaphor for this conversation, too.

But obviously, the hammer’s not conscious. The rock’s not conscious. A trace has been left; you’ve done a macro thing. You’ve cracked a rock in half. You’ve left a record of something happening. But we need to find out how that affects the universe. That action may still not leave a trace. If a rock cracks in half on a planet like Venus, next to a sun that shortly after that turns into a red giant, melting the entire surface of Mercury—but Venus will do—either of those planets if the entire planet is engulfed in a red giant, it doesn’t matter if that rock was cracked or not. The information potentially contained in the change of the rock from being whole to being cracked is all obliterated. If a universe ceases to exist, all the information the universe contains will be obliterated. You can argue that not all universes are necessarily obliterated.

But that’s a job for the physics and math of the future. A small universe, say one that contains three particles will almost certainly be obliterated. However, there’s a non-zero chance that a universe of that size will dissolve over a reasonable period of time. I’m unsure if that probability applies to a universe; I don’t know the size of our universe. You’ve got the set of all possible moments in the universe. You’ve got the set of all possible universes, but more than that, you’ve got the set of all possible moments in all possible universes. The question is about the math—whether you can arrange those moments so there’s a non-zero probability that a big universe can exist indefinitely. And that’s the only way for the information in that universe to continue to exist, for the universe to continue to exist. Except there is an abstract way for all the information in all universes to exist.

In this concept, this set of all possible moments in all possible universes is abstract. First, it’s an idea, and as an idea, it might not even exist because it might need to be corrected. If someone can prove that this set could exist or does exist, it doesn’t exist materially but exists in the sense that it’s not self-contradictory. It’s not obliterated because of internal inconsistency. The rules of consistency allow for the theoretical existence of this set.

So, all the information and all the universes exist theoretically as being embodied by these possible moments in all these possible universes. We don’t know whether that’s an analysis that can be done. It would have to be based on a lot of math we don’t have yet, so we need to understand that.

We think of aspects of physics as either basic or existing along a continuum from basic—one particle in a potential well, which is the simplest example in quantum physics. That’s what you get in the first week of the first semester of quantum mechanics. We think of physical systems going from very simple to as complex as we can imagine—the entire universe.

But when you look at things informationally, it may be that even the simplest system has to be considered embedded in a much larger universe. That universe has to be built out of information. What I’m getting at, but not very well, is that even the simplest systems might—you can talk about them, you can have a simple equation to describe how they behave, but when you talk about the actual simple systems that exist, you can’t do that without implying the existence of the most complicated and vast systems imaginable.

You can talk about the Earth without talking about turtles, but if you want something to hold the Earth up and talk about that at a deeper level, you might have to talk about the turtles down.

You might be able to avoid that by—when I’m talking about the turtles, I’m talking about any universe implying another universe, another likely vast universe that contains it, then another universe to contain that one, leading to universes down. But you may be able to dance around that if the universe beyond the universe can be characterized as probabilistically independent from any specific universe so that you can calculate the odds that our universe will continue to exist independently of what the actual universe contains. But even as I say it, that sounds like bullshit. On the other hand, I’m not sure you can have universes down, an infinity of universes, one containing the other, implying a further one that contains that one out to infinity.

You can’t do physics with infinities. At some point, are you allowed to replace an implied infinity with probabilistic calculations based on the physics of our universe or, at worst, the universe beyond our universe? Or is this whole thing misguided?

License & Copyright

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.

Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash