Beyond information: A bit of meaning. by Olaf Dreyer

Dear Olaf

I'd like to report something that I have already said in my thread, answering to your post, about your nicely written and interesting essay. To be honest I should confess that I share essentially nothing of your essay, though I rated it high since it is pleasant to read, provocative, and complementary to mine as Giovanni Amelino-Camelia says.

What I do not share is the "linguistic" notion of information, i.e. with a "meaning". This may make sense for classical information, which is sharable. But what is the meaning of quantum information, which is not sharable, but is secret? If you don't thing that quantum information is technically a kind of information (and for you information is only classical), I strongly suggest you the Pavia axiomatics for QT (PRA A 84 012311 (2011) http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v84/i1/e012311). The difference between classical and quantum information, is that the quantum one is purifiable, namely is only apparently lost, it is always preserved as long as you have control of the environment.

I can accept your assertion that "meaning arises through interaction, it is dynamic, and it is internal". But you should be more specific about it. How do you qualify the meaning in terms of the interaction? You cannot deny that interaction is ultimately only quantum. What is the quantum meaning in terms of the unitary operator? Internal to what? You should be more specific. How I describe mathematically the meaning? In your post you say: "Think of the list of positions of the atoms and molecules that make up the river (or ship). What does this list of numbers mean? To give meaning to these numbers you have to give a procedure of how to position the atoms. This requires material objects (like the standard meter that used to be in Paris)." My answer is: There is no such a way of measuring position of atoms. There are only outcomes from an indirect inference of the atom position within a theoretical description. The only position measurement in your sense is the classical measurement: then the meter is emergent notion at the topmost level.

You say: "Without matter information is literally meaningless". Here we are really at the opposite sides. For me matter is emergent! You are talking of the usual linguistic information, with a semantic, the one that we are using here in the blog, Not the one made of bits or the qubits. What are the meanings of the bit values 0 and 1? Information is processed by a computer in a "meaningless" way as a binary code. It seems to me that you missed the meaning of the theme of the essay competition: "It from Bit or Bit from It?" Not information in usual semantic sense.

However, apart from our manifest disagreement, I liked your essay, and I rated it well.

Best wishes,

with friendship

Mauro

Dear All

A standard-issue big city all-glass high-rise stands across the street from my usual bus stop. When I look up the high-rise facade, I can see the reflections of the near-by buildings and the white clouds from the sky above. Even when everything else looks pretty much the same, the reflections of the clouds are different, hour to hour and day to day.

After I boarded the bus, I rushed to get a single seat facing four others on a slightly elevated platorm. From my vantage point, I can't help noticing the shoes of the four passengers across from my seat are not the same, by either the make , the design, or the style, and that is true even when the four passengers happen to be members of the same family.

I could change the objects of my fascination from shoes to something else, to buttons on the dresses for example, but I do not think the result would have been any different. Diversity or Uniqueness would still rule the day! (There is a delightful essay on the subject of uniqueness by Joe Fisher in this contest.)

I am pretty sure people are fascinated by the diversity and the uniqueness in the world, when the other side of it is the inevitable boredom of sameness every time.

However, we have a need to know where all this beautiful and enchanting diversity comes from. Borrowing Wheelerian phraseology of "How come the quantum?", I ask "How come the diversity?" A standard physics answer is "Entropy always increases." (I am not a physicist, and I don't know if that is the final answer.)

Whenever I'm out of my depth, I go back to my theory of everything (TOE), which is a mental brew of common sense, intuition, gut, analogy, judgement, etc. etc. , buttressed when I can with a little thought-experiment.

The thought-experiment is simple. Imagine cutting a circle into two precisely, identical, and equal parts. Practically, there is no way we can get the desired result, because one part will be bigger or smaller in some way.

Physics - especially quantum physics - says it don't matter, do the superposition!

But superposition is fictive, an invention like the Macarena dance, and it has given us a cat, alive and dead at the same time.

I have heard that angels can dance on the tip of the needle, and now I'm finding out some of us can too!

Cheers and Good Luck to All,

Than Tin

Dear Olaf

Thank you for constructional criticism of my essay. It benefits rather than complimenting from nonprofessionals.

I will try to answer your questions.

1.My observation 18 deg concerning only pseudoscalar mesons where spin=0 and two charged leptons(mu and tau) where spin=1/2.But 18 deg no so important than symmetry around proton.This is an amazing symmetry was not noticed until now.

2.Puzzle of 137 is more sophisticate than 1836,because contains 3 components (c,e,h) whereas 1836 contains only one(m) component

Cheers

Yuri