Thread: The Other IT

Was reading today where IBM had managed to store a bit of information using only 12 atoms. Little did I know that upon looking further into this that it would end up with me looking at Information Theory. I can recall hearing of this term but never really understood what they were talking about. Found this interesting article on it….

https://www.universetoday.com/153035...able-universe/

I didn’t know if 12 atoms was a good number or not but it appears that’s nowhere near the number the article suggests, 1.5 bits of information per elementary particle in the universe. So we probably have a long way to go in that regard.

Head scratch: Could that number be even higher or is there room for more info and is there a limit to how much info an atom can contain?

Now if IBM can put 1/12th of a bit in an atom, my layman’s brain tells me more can be added since that atom already contains 1.5 bits. Obviously humans are working to encode a bit in much fewer than 12 atoms so sounds like they’re already finding that out.

Do you think information theory is credible? Is the universe a computer in some sense by storing information?

Originally Posted by zinjanthropos

Head scratch: Could that number be even higher or is there room for more info and is there a limit to how much info an atom can contain?

Do you think information theory is credible? Is the universe a computer in some sense by storing information?

Infomation theory seems credible, if one can understand it. In fact, it is better defined as incredible as it involves entropy and other physical pricicples which makes its full understanding non-trivial.

This is really high-brow stuff. Reading through the Wiki link on this* does not hold much promise for ease of understanding. It seems you need to be an expert in math, physics and a few other areas just to get in the door.

Quoting from the link below:

"Some other important measures in information theory are mutual information, channel capacity, error exponents, and relative entropy. Important sub-fields of information theory include source coding, algorithmic complexity theory, algorithmic information theory and information-theoretic security."

end quote

Hard to imagine there are many people doing work in this area. Good luck finding a credible answer we can all understand!


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory

Originally Posted by Double Helix

Infomation theory seems credible, if one can understand it. In fact, it is better defined as incredible as it involves entropy and other physical pricicples which makes its full understanding non-trivial.

This is really high-brow stuff. Reading through the Wiki link on this* does not hold much promise for ease of understanding. It seems you need to be an expert in math, physics and a few other areas just to get in the door.

Yeah, seems hard to wrap one’s head around.

I was thinking of matter and energy respectively, one being material and the other the force that moves the material, and wondered where information fits in. Is a bit energy? I don’t think information would have any mass or be able to move anything. Seems a bit can either be stored or move at light speed, probably wrong on that. Better stop before I really dig a hole for myself.