Bit: from Breaking symmetry of it by WANG Xiong

Xiong

You have given a short course on physics and information, bringing together different kinds of relevant strands from both, organizing clearly and logically. It's a big help, when one is confused about whether the aphorism is "It from Bit" as Wheeler puts it, or "It from Qubit" as one of the contestant puts it.

Now about the langrangian formulations of physics. In the thought-experiment I made in my essay "Analogical Engine", a simulacrum or a conceptual derivation of "Planck constant" was obtained. I think the arguments I made have fixed the meaning of the Planck constant as an arbiter of what is real and what is not.

Can you relate to any of those arguments?

My essay can be found at this link http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1865.

Best wishes

Than Tin

Wang,

I heard back regarding my request for allowing an extension for those of you who had the rating function delayed and was told, "The delay in ratings is unfortunate, but we will not change the final deadline at this stage."

I will keep this in mind by rating your essay more favorably when I review it this week.

Best wishes,

Manuel

Dear Wang,

Thank you for your essay. Yours is the most original suggestion in over 175 essays. It is compatible with the explanation I present in my essay, but is a higher level of abstraction. I think your idea has the potential to clarify the current confusion about information which is so completely revealed by the entries in this contest.

I will give you a score designed to keep you on top so that more people will see your essay.

Congratulations, and thank you for writing your essay!

Best regards,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hello Xiong,

I am glad to welcome you again in the contest! World Competition FQXi - this is a competition for new ideas in fundamental science. You have presented a lovely, clear and distinct, as the Rene Descartes, essays and profound ideas. It is extremely important conclusions: «Symmetry breaking give rise to information» and «We can conjecture that one day a more complete theory should unify all the three basic concepts Matter-Energy-Information. Then we can fully understand what is information, what's its relation with reality, and the ultimate relation of it and bit. "...

"Great Trinity" (Matter-Energy-Information) to open all its secrets for physicists and lyrics. It remains only to deal with the deep structure of matter, energy, and how to understand what is «in-forma». In the words of Nobel Laureate David Gross, we need to construction a «general framework structure». I'll add: with the ontological justification. That "general framework structure" will give the opportunity to see the fundamental "symmetry" and "asymmetry" of "the self-aware Universe" (Basil Nalimov), "grab" the nature of the information.

I invite you to comment on my essay and fairly priced. I believe that we are close to you in our search for theSpirit and walk in the same direction: you as a physicist, and I as a lyricist.

Good luck in the contest and best wishes,

Vladimir

Dear Wang,

You develop the far reaching idea that information is created by symmetry breaking.

I found at least one relevant paper for this issue "Information Originates in Symmetry Breaking"

by John Collier, Symmetry: Science and Culture 7 (1996): 247-256, available on line.

At first sight, this "bit from it" perspective seems to contradict Wheeler's observer participancy

when symmetry breaking ideas are implemented in the quantum domain. This aspect is developed

at length in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-consciousness/

Pierre Curie (the father of piezoelectricity and thus of modern quartz cristal clocks) explained to us

that "symmetry breaking has the following role: for the occurrence of a phenomenon in a medium, the original

symmetry group of the medium must be lowered (broken, in today's terminology) to the symmetry group of the

phenomenon (or to a subgroup of the phenomenon's symmetry group) by the action of some cause."

I still plagiarize the encyclopedia

"Goldstone theorem. In the case of a global continuous symmetry, massless bosons (known as "Goldstone bosons")

appear with the spontaneous breakdown of the symmetry according to a theorem first stated by J. Goldstone in 1960.

The presence of these massless bosons, first seen as a serious problem since no particles of the sort had been

observed in the context considered, was in fact the basis for the solution -- by means of the so-called Higgs mechanism"

Now I switch to my own essay which claims that contextuality has to do with Grothendieck's drawings: they correspond to

subgroups of the free group on two generators. Thus your approach does not contradict mine and the "it from bit"

perspective. I am happy of that.

Thank you and best wishes.

Michel

Dear Wang,

On a second thought, your response above to my question of 10th July underrates the power of your postulate.

Going strictly by your thesis information (the bit) emerges from the it via symmetry breaking. Now by definition information is not merely about mass. Or is it? Consider that to qualify as the essential "it" that gives rise to ALL PHYSICAL INFORMATION your "it" should be more appropriately a wavefunction by any other name be it "Higgs field", phase space, uncertainty, big bang etc.

You say that to understand wave function we should understand dirac spinor. The little i do understand is that Dirac's equation basically renders Schrodinger's equation relativistic. Now if you can please look again at my equation (1) it presumes Dirac's electron-positron pair and then at equation (3) we are able to get easily the Hartree approximation of the n-body wavefunction of the electron. Seems to me that if you read between the lines you can actually see hints of your dirac spinor.

My essay may not be elegant but the data it presents should convince you to face up to the power of your postulate. And, Wang, don't be afraid to push the boundaries,it is what we are here for.

And please remember to actually log in as community and rate me. Why not!

Sincerely,

Chidi

Hello Wang,

I like your essay. I also like the way you describe information as: general, technical and physic. On the general way of describing information, will you say "existence" is information, so that existence/non-existence becomes a binary choice (Bit) that can be represented technically as 0 and 1?

Also, can a line with length and zero breadth carry information?

If you agree that existence/non-existence can be a Bit, check my essay here and give me your comments.

Good luck in the contest.

Akinbo

Dear Wang,

I have down loaded your essay and soon post my comments on it. Meanwhile, please, go through my essay and post your comments.

Regards and good luck in the contest,

Sreenath BN.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827

Hello Xiong,

I am pleased to read your essay. Great, deep new ideas, important conclusions: ﾂｫWe argue that the essential of information is also related to symmetry, actually its antithesis symmetry breaking.ﾂｻ .. ﾂｫWe can conjecture that one day a more complete theory should unify all the three basic concepts Matter-Energy-Information. Then we can fully understand what is information, what's its relation with reality, and the ultimate relation of it and bit. ﾂｻ

Indeed, it is an in-depth understanding of the new, a new interpretation and representation of the concept "matter", "energy", "information", "symmetry", "asymmetry". Need a new understanding of "the great trinity" in the foundation of the Universe. Assistant there can be no traditional knowledge, in particular, a modern interpretation of the "magic matrix Lo Shu" (Chinese Simplified. 洛 书, pinyin: luﾃｲ shū) ﾂｫmagic square is a 3 ﾃ-- 3". Physics and philosophy have go together, hand in hand, helping each other, as taught by A.Einstein: "At the present time, a physicist has to deal with philosophic problems to a much greater extent than physicists of the previous generations had to deal with" and J. Wheeler "Philosophy is too important to be left to the philosophers". Please see also my essay.

Luck in the contest and best wishes,

Vladimir

Hello, Xiong,

I also liked your very condensation of physics with the problem of information. However, I feel your analysis is weak at one critical point, where you say "If the physical system is invariant. What if the physical system is not invariant? And where did the system comes from in the first place? Please look at my essay on this, if your would. I am sending you an E-mail on a related matter.

Best regards,

Joseph

Dear Wang,

Excellent job! I rated your essay accordingly. The issue now how the symmetry was broken? By what action? How? If I may posit that KQID theory can illuminate this symmetry breaking event. If I may quote a full version of my essay Child of Qbit in time:

Wang Yaming's one bit

Fu Xi heaven triagram ☰ as the element that are creative, innovative and proactive forces that gives A bits first, whereas the earth trigram ☷ as the element that are receptive, flowing and reactive forces that takes and converts A into S bits later to complete a cycle. The heaven ☰ is doing the first Giving and the earth ☷ is doing the first Taking: Existence emerges. The act of Giving is the beginning of the Taking and the act of Taking is completing the Giving. The Giving first and Taking later principle is the unity of Wang Yangming's one bit. The Giving and Taking collapse the bits-wave function of Giving and Taking. This collapse of the bits-waves function ψI(CTE) means the breaking of symmetry of the state of equilibrium before the Giving and the state of equilibrium before the Taking. This ψI(CTE) is bits-waves function of consciousness (C), time (T) and energy (E). The breaking of symmetry yield at least one or more bit/s as its manifestation of the creation and distribution of new bit/s. if the Giving and Taking do not yield any bit/s, then the act of Giving was is not consummated by the act of Taking, thus, there is no collapse of the bits-waves function and no information gain. See excellent article on information gain hypothesis by Pfister and Wehner, arXiv:1210.0194v3. A bit means information gain. Information gain means the breaking of the symmetry from the act of Giving and Taking consummated in the meeting of the mind as well as actual Exchange of equal value from the respective giver and taker. (jurisprudence of contract law). The act of Giving andTaking are aborted and not consummated without breaking the symmetry and hereby no information gains. This is the KQID simple mechanism of Creation and Distribution.

Excellent!

Please rate and make comment to my essay.

Best wishes,

Leo KoGuan

Dear Wang,

Very nice! I think you will find that your essay and mine precisely agree on the important issue of symmetry breaking (although I use the topological term "orientability" for this phenomenon).

Indeed, there is no life without it. I like your concise statement: "Symmetry means you can not tell the different, under some change, according to a particular observation. This means information is lost." Or it means that no information is instantiated -- or differentiated -- until, as Brouwer put it, one performs the act of a "move of time." In a 2007 conference paper I conjectured that time, energy and information are identical phenomena.

May your tribe increase. Best wishes in the competition.

Tom

Hello Xiong,

As the contest in Wheeler's honor draws to a close, leaving for the moment considerations of rating and prize money, and knowing we cannot all agree on whether 'it' comes from 'bit' or otherwise or even what 'it' and 'bit' mean, and as we may not be able to read all essays, though we should try, I pose the following 4 simple questions and will rate you accordingly before July 31 when I will be revisiting your blog.

"If you wake up one morning and dip your hand in your pocket and 'detect' a million dollars, then on your way back from work, you dip your hand again and find that there is nothing there...

1) Have you 'elicited' an information in the latter case?

2) If you did not 'participate' by putting your 'detector' hand in your pocket, can you 'elicit' information?

3) If the information is provided by the presence of the crisp notes ('its') you found in your pocket, can the absence of the notes, being an 'immaterial source' convey information?

Finally, leaving for the moment what the terms mean and whether or not they can be discretely expressed in the way spin information is discretely expressed, e.g. by electrons

4) Can the existence/non-existence of an 'it' be a binary choice, representable by 0 and 1?"

Answers can be in binary form for brevity, i.e. YES = 1, NO = 0, e.g. 0-1-0-1.

Best regards,

Akinbo

Xiong,

Thank you for your explanation of how information arises from symmetry breaking. Your exposition was very clear.

The emergence of information can also be explained as the loss of quantum entanglement, which is time-symmetric in Lagrangian mechanics. Whereas you see a Matter-Energy-Information trinity, I formulate a duality between momentum/energy and position/time symmetry. (See my essay "A Complex Conjugate Bit and It".)

You have given me food for thought. My theory is also a trinity if the observer is included as a third subsystem in the creation of information.

Best wishes,

Richard