Essay Abstract
In one of the great scientific tragedies of the past century, "Modern Physics" was developed long before the development of Information Theory. Consequently, the early search for the "meaning" of the equations of mathematical physics, especially quantum physics, was based on several critical assumptions about the nature of information, which have subsequently been shown to be untrue. Unfortunately, none of the physicists, at the time, (and apparently even today) recognized these assumptions, as such. Hence, the misunderstandings engendered by those assumptions have become unquestioned dogma. Equations contain very little information. This fact is what makes it possible to symbolically represent them, in a computer memory, by a very small number of bits. As a direct result of this fact, we can conclude, contrary to the fervent belief of most physicists, that equations cannot describe anything other than the most trivial physical phenomenon; those nearly devoid of all information. For complex phenomenon, it is the vast information content of the initial conditions (like the content of an observer's memory) rather than the tiny information content of equations, that really matters. Indeed, observations become "quantized" if and only if the information content of the observations is small. It is not small physical size, but small information content, that is the cause of "quantization." More importantly, since the information content of the "meaning" of the equations is usually much greater than the information content of the equations themselves, the "meaning" cannot possibly be contained within the equations; the "meaning" has simply been made-up and slapped-on. The controversies and paradoxes surrounding non-locality, superposition, entanglement, and the uncertainty principle are all examples of this problem; the equations accurately describe the observations, it is only the slapped-on "meaning", that causes of all the difficulties in understanding.
Author Bio
Robert H. McEachern was educated as an AstroPhysicist. He then worked for several years as a Geophysicist, during which time he became interested in signal processing theory. He then spent the rest of his career developing signal processing algorithms for application to communications systems, and sensor systems. He is now retired.