Black Holes and The Internet

[nebulus]

Just to add:
The way information is destroyed in a black hole, as far as I understand it now, is.

Something enters a black hole and all the quantum information is converted into gravity.
So the following example is not applicable...

An egg on the table has structure and pattern. Assuming all eggs are exactly alike, I can convey the structure of it to you with the term 'egg'. A broken egg on the floor cannot be conveyed as precisely. I might have to use words like this: "There is a fragment of a shell 1/4" in size over here, a splattering of yoke over there, and so on."
Each broken egg is different.

Particles as unique entities disappear. What was an electron/proton or what have you becomes gravity. So you can't go back and do "take that electron and put it back into this place". That electron is out of existence. So if you have a group of electrons that encode some information undergo a similar process. Where does the information go? (other than emerge on the internet by some mysterious process )

Also, thank you all for solid ideas!

[1715586743]

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[Roger_Murdock]

It doesn't matter what you find appealing. Objects are no concept they exist.
Information is a property of an object, interpreted by our brains. The notion that objects consist of information is ludicrous, a typical fallacy perpetrated by those who follow esoteric teachings.
It might suit their purposes but in a scientific sense it is just plain wrong.

It doesn't matter what I find appealing? To whom doesn't it matter? (It matters to me.) And when you say that it doesn't "matter" are you suggesting that my beliefs regarding the nature of reality are "immaterial"?   (Because if so, I'd tend to agree.) Why doesn't it matter? Is it because there is an objective reality that exists separate and apart from my experience of the same? If so, how can I know that for sure given that all of my knowledge of that reality is necessarily filtered through my experience?

Are you suggesting that mind arises from matter? What's your response to those who argue the opposite, i.e. that matter arises from mind?  Have you seen this video? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=119344.0 What's your response to the argument it presents?

What "esoteric teachings" are you referring to specifically? (I'd be very interested in learning more about them.  )

Can we know that our universe is not a computer simulation?  If so, how can we know that? If we can't know that, and our universe were a simulation, would you still say that the notion that objects consist of information is ludicrous?

When you say that I'm wrong "in a scientific sense," what do you mean? Are there any senses in which I'm right?

[mobodick]

You don't need something that has mass to store information. You can store information in photons or something subatomic for example.

Most subatomic particles have mass. Photons can be used for transmitting information, not storing it. You cannot have a bottle with light. (well I have few bottles of light beer still unopened but this is not the case, they contain a loss of information if I pass out) You still need some structure that have mass to support the storage and retrieval of information.

So we get no information whatsoever out of the photons that travel to us from distant stars, right?
A lightwave traveling from a star to us is only 'transfering' infromation, but does not contain (store) it?

I think you need a wider definition of information

Information is that which differentiates one state from another.
So actually any system can store or transduce information.
The fact that a photon has a certain frequency is information.
Saying that it doesn't store information is ridiculous. It's very expression in this universe is defined by information!

The problem is of course that we have mass and most of our consumption of information needs to be in the form of massive particles.
Light is just not very practical as a storage medium.

In any case, transmitting information requires the system to at least temporarily store the information.

I do not buy the argument that we are going reach a limit. Transistors will go away something based on something else might come up or the way we handle information.

Yes we probably do. In year 2070 Intel and Samsung will start to make SSD chips that store multiple bits per quark. If it is possible, lol. But there is some fundamental laws of physics that prevent anyone to accumulate infinite amount of information and some scientists are perfectly clear about this.

But we do not need infinite amounts of information stored in one place.
The limits you talk about are pretty extreme.
The event horizon of a black hole, for instance, can be seen as a 2D surface that contains all the information of the matter inside the black hole. But that infinetly thin layer of information on the event horizon is all there is to know about the mass (and/or energy) inside it.
If you can describe so much matter (and its energy, the same type as in a atomic bomb) by such a thin layer of two dimensional information then there is hope for storing our tiny human datasets in a small pice of matter.

Like for example quantum computer deal with way more information.

Quantum computers are not here and none knows when they will be available on newegg.com

If you destroy any kind of information a particle is created usually graviton.

Do gravitons exist? It is some time I have not updated my knowledge on quantum physics but I'm certain that this is not true at all.

So while small amount of information is destroyed in black holes some amount of information is created else where (the internet).

The black holes can destroy the information if they like. I don't care. For example tiny part of mass of nuclear material in atomic bomb is converted to pure energy when the nuke explodes. This does not mean that part of that "destroyed" mass miraculously shows up in someones arsehole. The black holes in far reaches of galaxy really are not connected to the internet!

But in a nuclear explosion there is no information destroyed whatsoever, it is merely converted.
If you would look at the end product (mostly energy) you could trace back how the information looked before the conversion (it looked like matter).
The whole point about this black hole stuff is that the information that goes in is not the same that comes out. So by looking at the information that comes out you have no idea what caused it.
It's like the information is put into a gigantic box of random information on one end and at the other end a random set of information appears.
It's like the best random generator in the universe! Put in ordered stuff and you get maximum disorder.

[mobodick]

There is a major fallacy within this whole argument.

The Universe is information itself. When you store information somewhere, you haven't created new information. Instead, all you've done is change the information which already existed, plus change the existing information within your brain to interpret it as being meaningful to you.

No new quantity of information is created.

Information is a concept, the universe is made of objects.

Objects are concepts.
The universe is made of possibilities.
Information describes the relation between different expressions of possibility.

[mobodick]

The universe contains infinite amount of info. Otherwise infinite loops would be impossible and you could not make a fact out of a fact.

Infinite loops require infinite time because of the limit of the speed of light of information.

So here you only need the idea of infinite information if you are sure the universe will exist forever.

[fergalish]

Next, when something falls into a black hole, its information is preserved.

What exactly makes you draw this conclusion? I think it is rather the opposite. Information is destroyed inside the black hole actually it is the only place where destruction can happen.

Stephen Hawking sez so?:

In 2004 Hawking himself conceded a bet he had made, agreeing that black hole evaporation does in fact preserve information.

Unfortunately you'd have to ask Hawking himself to explain it better. I looked at the proof, but it's greek to me - no offence, greeks :-)

Eventually, however, the pile will be so dense that it will collapse into a black hole, and the surface area of the black hole will be directly proportional to the amount of information in the pile.

You are assuming two things. 1) you definitely need mass to store information 2) there is a limit to how much information could be stored in a given amount of mass

1) you do  2) there is.
1) What else will you store it with? Please be specific.
2) The upper limit, presumably, would be encoding a bit of usable information in each of the quantum properties of, e.g., an atom or subatomic particle (so: spin, polarisation, color, etc).

I was not suggesting gravity decreases because information goes up. I was only stating the fact that less mass is need to store the same amount of information and hence there is a drop in gravity per. I was trying to illustrate the point that the opposite process happen in a black holes - a black hole minimizes the amount of information to increase gravity (also conversion).

The amount of information in 1kg of silicon SDRAM wafer is almost precisely the same irrespective of whether is contains Shakespeare's sonnets, or just uninitialized random junk straight from the factory. This is because each bit (for us) is made up of millions of quantum bits of information about the state of the atoms composing that single macro-bit. So, in the analogy of the coin-toss, think of each silicon nano-bit reading off either heads or tails, randomly. The infomation in the silicon is *far* greater than the additional info obtained from Shakespeare's sonnets. I mean orders of magnitude greater.
A black hole does not minimize or information, and it doesn't 'create' or 'increase' or 'store' gravity. If you want to talk about black holes, there is only one valid framework in which to do so - General Relativity. (scientists are trying to apply quantum mech. to BHs too, but not yet successful). The gravity, therefore, does not originate in the black hole, but is a 'symptom' of the bending of space-time due to the mass contained within the black hole. Incidentally, mass is one of the three defining characteristics of a black hole: mass, spin and charge. Once you know those, you know all there is to know about a black hole - just like the Pressure and Temperature of an ideal gas. You still won't know anything about the speed of individual molecules, or about the single bits of information leaked by black hole evaporation, but as far as knowing how the black hole, or ideal gas, behaves, there is nothing more to know.

Just like a black hole I guess, which merely stores gravity? According to the article information is converted into gravity. I was using term internet as a black-box term for supermind something capable to produce information. This discussion for example is the product of the internet (our minds or what have you). So yes, internet produces information.

Have you read any of Shannon's theories? Information is 'turned into' gravity by virtue of the fact that the information is carried by massive particles which contribute to the black hole's mass and so alter the nearby gravitational field.
Let me ask you something: does a digital camera create or merely capture information? The internet, even considering it as somehow a 'hive' mind (the whole is greater than the sum of the parts etc) isn't creating anything. "It" is merely processing and memorizing information "it" finds interesting.

[fergalish]

Something enters a black hole and all the quantum information is converted into gravity.
So the following example is not applicable...

An egg on the table has structure and pattern. Assuming all eggs are exactly alike, I can convey the structure of it to you with the term 'egg'. A broken egg on the floor cannot be conveyed as precisely. I might have to use words like this: "There is a fragment of a shell 1/4" in size over here, a splattering of yoke over there, and so on."
Each broken egg is different.

Particles as unique entities disappear. What was an electron/proton or what have you becomes gravity. So you can't go back and do "take that electron and put it back into this place". That electron is out of existence. So if you have a group of electrons that encode some information undergo a similar process. Where does the information go? (other than emerge on the internet by some mysterious process )

Actually, the case of the broken egg *is* analogous. Imagine if we had a Super-Duper Universal Quantum Scanning Machine (SDUQSM) which could scan any specified region of space-time and store all quantum information it found there. Now let the egg roll off the table. Afterwards, we could take the information from our SDUQSM - how the egg rolled just so, how that spatter interacted just so with that molecule of gas, and then with that atom of floor, and so on.... and so on....., well, we could reconstruct the egg just the way it was before. The information is perfectly preserved in the dynamic evolution of the system.
Now let's point our SDUQSM at a black hole, and then throw an egg into it - into the black hole, that is, not into the SDUQSM, it's a very expensive and delicate machine :-)
Well, by knowing the initial quantum state of the black hole (I mean, all the information "written" on it's surface), and by observing how it behaves after the egg falls in - that is, by carefully recording all information given off as the black hole evaporates over a period of googillions of years, well, we could reconstruct the egg again.
You should read "George's secret key to the universe" by Hawking. It's a book written for children, but it does explore the possibility of reconstructing something that falls into a black hole.  The point being, the information is NOT lost or destroyed. Merely, let's say, randomized, or encrypted in a certain sense.

[mobodick]

1) information = inverse of entropy

To be more precise, if you take all information out of a system you are left with pure entropy.
Entropy is complementary to information.
But it also depends on how you use the word.
It would maybe be more correct to say: 'ammount of usefull information = inverse of entropy' as entropy itself can still contain information but that information cannot usefully interact with its environment.

2) the entropy of a closed system always increase with time (2nd law of thermodynamics)

... or stays the same.
The point is that it cannot decrease.

3) the Universe is a closed system

We don't know that.

4) There is not such law as of "information conservation" Information can be easely destroyed. Kick a jigsaw for example, or crash a harddisk by dropping it on the floor for that matter.

Yes there is such a law and it can be used as a basis for laws such as conservation of energy.
Kicking a jigsaw doesn't destroy information, it merely recombines existing information.
You could say that you have added a kick of your own information to the information already there.
So if you know the exact informational content of your kick then you could 'simply' subtract this from the new chaotic state and thereby recreating the pre-kick information of the jigsaw.

new jigsaw information = old jigsaw information + kick information.

[ElectricMucus]

There is a major fallacy within this whole argument.

The Universe is information itself. When you store information somewhere, you haven't created new information. Instead, all you've done is change the information which already existed, plus change the existing information within your brain to interpret it as being meaningful to you.

No new quantity of information is created.

Information is a concept, the universe is made of objects.

Objects are concepts.
The universe is made of possibilities.
Information describes the relation between different expressions of possibility.

Then define the word object.

[mobodick]

There is a major fallacy within this whole argument.

The Universe is information itself. When you store information somewhere, you haven't created new information. Instead, all you've done is change the information which already existed, plus change the existing information within your brain to interpret it as being meaningful to you.

No new quantity of information is created.

Information is a concept, the universe is made of objects.

Objects are concepts.
The universe is made of possibilities.
Information describes the relation between different expressions of possibility.

Then define the word object.

Well, for one an object suggests clearly defined boundaries.
And absolutely nothing in the universe has clearly defined boundaries.
So an object is a human concept that helps us focus on certain seemingly coherent parts of reality.
There is no meaningfull definition of an object in physics.

[ElectricMucus]

There is no meaningfull definition of an object in physics.

How about something that has a location and has length, width and height?

[mobodick]

There is no meaningfull definition of an object in physics.

How about something that has a location and has length, width and height?

Yeah, well there you go.
A wave has none of these and yet everything seems to be based on wavelike behaviour.
Nothing has a certain position in time.
Nothing has an exact width or height.
Things only seem that way because of how our senses work.
We are on a pretty stable scale when it comes to these things and naturally our senses evolved to measure reality on this scale.
But on the atomic and subatomic scale these ideas of position and size become blurry.

So the idea of physical objects is just a concept to describe how we perceive certain things through our senses.
It's just an abstraction.

[mobodick]

Something enters a black hole and all the quantum information is converted into gravity.
So the following example is not applicable...

An egg on the table has structure and pattern. Assuming all eggs are exactly alike, I can convey the structure of it to you with the term 'egg'. A broken egg on the floor cannot be conveyed as precisely. I might have to use words like this: "There is a fragment of a shell 1/4" in size over here, a splattering of yoke over there, and so on."
Each broken egg is different.

Particles as unique entities disappear. What was an electron/proton or what have you becomes gravity. So you can't go back and do "take that electron and put it back into this place". That electron is out of existence. So if you have a group of electrons that encode some information undergo a similar process. Where does the information go? (other than emerge on the internet by some mysterious process )

Actually, the case of the broken egg *is* analogous. Imagine if we had a Super-Duper Universal Quantum Scanning Machine (SDUQSM) which could scan any specified region of space-time and store all quantum information it found there. Now let the egg roll off the table. Afterwards, we could take the information from our SDUQSM - how the egg rolled just so, how that spatter interacted just so with that molecule of gas, and then with that atom of floor, and so on.... and so on....., well, we could reconstruct the egg just the way it was before. The information is perfectly preserved in the dynamic evolution of the system.

The problem with your scanner is that it is not physical.
You cannot learn every bit of information about a system without destroying it in the process.
And only classical information is preserved in the dynamic evolution of a system.
Part of the other information goes towards entropy and becomes irretreivable.

So you can only reconstruct the egg with information you cannot ever acquire!
In other words, you would have to approximate the egg because you cannot know fully how it was before.

Now let's point our SDUQSM at a black hole, and then throw an egg into it - into the black hole, that is, not into the SDUQSM, it's a very expensive and delicate machine :-)
Well, by knowing the initial quantum state of the black hole (I mean, all the information "written" on it's surface), and by observing how it behaves after the egg falls in - that is, by carefully recording all information given off as the black hole evaporates over a period of googillions of years, well, we could reconstruct the egg again.
You should read "George's secret key to the universe" by Hawking. It's a book written for children, but it does explore the possibility of reconstructing something that falls into a black hole.  The point being, the information is NOT lost or destroyed. Merely, let's say, randomized, or encrypted in a certain sense.

Yes, but the information will be perfectly decorrelated if i'm not mistaken.
You would have no idea what bit of information that came out belongs to what information that went in.
You have no chance of even beginning a reconstruction!

[ElectricMucus]

There is no meaningfull definition of an object in physics.

How about something that has a location and has length, width and height?

Yeah, well there you go.
A wave has none of these and yet everything seems to be based on wavelike behaviour.

How so? A wave is also something that describes the property of an object, namely oscillation.

Nothing has a certain position in time.
Nothing has an exact width or height.

How is that relevant? Are you familiar with the concept of Real Numbers?

Things only seem that way because of how our senses work.
We are on a pretty stable scale when it comes to these things and naturally our senses evolved to measure reality on this scale.
But on the atomic and subatomic scale these ideas of position and size become blurry.

So the idea of physical objects is just a concept to describe how we perceive certain things through our senses.
It's just an abstraction.

The only reason why subatomic particles cannot be really measured is because you would have to use other particles to do it. Doing the same thing with marbles has the same effect. But we don't even know that there are really these particles, it is just an extrapolation. You can try to describe an electron as a wave but you still would need it to be some property of an object.

[nebulus]

@fergalish, I am actually going of the article that I linked to above. The authors are claiming that information is destroyed and gravity appears as a result of a gradient between entropies in two different places.

As far as all the posts go mobodick is closest to define how entropy and information are connected that relates.

if you take all information out of a system you are left with pure entropy.

To summarize the main article there is always an interaction going between regions of low entropy (some information) and high entropy (less information) that causes gravity to arise.

Black hole is an entity with high gravity that sucks shit in. So basically overtime the information inside a black whole would increase and rather than become a massively more gravitational singularity it would become the opposite. The accepted fact is that the more stuff goes into the black hole the more massive it becomes. So either there is not enough information information that goes in to equalize the growth or the information is destroyed on the inside.

[mobodick]

There is no meaningfull definition of an object in physics.

How about something that has a location and has length, width and height?

Yeah, well there you go.
A wave has none of these and yet everything seems to be based on wavelike behaviour.

How so? A wave is also something that describes the property of an object, namely oscillation.

What is oscillating in a radio wave?

Nothing has a certain position in time.
Nothing has an exact width or height.

How is that relevant? Are you familiar with the concept of Real Numbers?

-facepalm- Do you want to talk in circles again?
It is relevant because all matter has wave behaviour so none of the things we have in the universe have well defined position or dimension.
We were talking about you saying that the universe is based on objects and now that i tell you that is not true you start to walk around the elephant in the room.\

Things only seem that way because of how our senses work.
We are on a pretty stable scale when it comes to these things and naturally our senses evolved to measure reality on this scale.
But on the atomic and subatomic scale these ideas of position and size become blurry.

So the idea of physical objects is just a concept to describe how we perceive certain things through our senses.
It's just an abstraction.

The only reason why subatomic particles cannot be really measured is because you would have to use other particles to do it. Doing the same thing with marbles has the same effect. But we don't even know that there are really these particles, it is just an extrapolation. You can try to describe an electron as a wave but you still would need it to be some property of an object.

No, thats not true.
The uncertainty principle is a real phenomenon. It is not about measuring error and we know this for some time now.
Quantum mechanics realy is very very srange to us.

I urge you to do the double slit experiment with marbles...
Your marble will not interfere.
Electrons and any small mass does interfere with itself, just like the massless photon.
So mass behaves as if it is in multiple places at the same time.

To describe a wave you only need forces and time.
Is the EM field an object?
Waves don't require an object but they do need a space to 'wave' in.

[mobodick]

To summarize the main article there is always an interaction going between regions of low entropy (some information) and high entropy (less information) that causes gravity to arise.

In fact i would say that ANY interesting phenomenon in our universe needs both.

It is just beautifull to see how biology sits neatly between chaos and order.
Too much order and nothing can interact.
Too little order and everything falls apart.

[ElectricMucus]

Congratulations! You just re-invented the ether.

[mobodick]

Congratulations! you just re-invented the ether.

Yup, that's (and i'm not kidding) the forefront of current physics.
Of course it's a different kind of 'ether' then what people normally think of.

[ElectricMucus]

Congratulations! you just re-invented the ether.

Yup, that's (and i'm not kidding) the forefront of current physics.
Of course it's a different kind of 'ether' then what people normally think of.

I'm sure it is

Here is a youtube video about the double slit experiment done with a needle instead of a double slit by the guy who inspired me to take part in this discussion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOwTV-HgDUo