Essay Abstract

It is argued that physics is mathematics of information, hence any physical entity is mathematical, but not vice versa. As a necessary basis, the concept of "information" is discussed. As a result, there is no freedom in setting physical scales, rather the Planckian scales are to be used according to the density at which nature stores information.

Author Bio

Educated as a physicist, I worked in the field of High Energy Physics at the University of Graz in the 1980ies. After that, I have taken a position in the administration, where I am involved in technology-related activities. In parallel, I have retained and even increased my personal interest in fundamental questions.

Download Essay PDF File

Gerald -

I agree with you about the basic role played by information in physics. But I think something crucial is lost in your notion that "the concept of information is absolutely simple and transparent: Information... is a pure number."

As Shannon noted, this is only one aspect of information. In my essay on semantics, I emphasized that physics involves many kinds of information - e.g. length, mass, charge, spin etc. The fact that these are all related to each other mathematically doesn't mean they're all reducible to the same thing, or that their differences aren't fundamental. On the contrary, the equations of physics give each one a unique role in the structure of the world, in relation to other kinds of information. The fact that length can be expressed as a number of Planck units doesn't make it the same as electric charge, which is also expressed in basic units. So I doubt that we can get to the heart of physics by abstracting from these important differences.

Electric charge can be meaningfully defined only if length, velocity, force, etc. are also meaningfully defined. This kind of meaning is entirely physical; it doesn't involve human perception or imagination. Since the relationships between physical parameters can be expressed in mathematical equations, no doubt physics is profoundly mathematical. But apparently it takes a very complex combination of very different mathematical structures to support a world like ours, where many different kinds of information are all physically definable in terms of each other. This is not at all the kind of system studied in pure mathematics.

Thanks for the chance to respond to your interesting essay -

Conrad

    Conrad,

    thank you very much for your interest.

    I do understand your concern and your aim of „Finding Meaning" as the title of your essay says. Information appears as inextricably linked with meaning. In this light, it had confused and dismayed me over a long time that what Shannon ended up with is not more than a mathematical formula telling how to compute a number. Maybe I gave up hope then and became too radical, but I am not sure. It has happened over history of science that entities whose existence had appeared as undisputable turned out as misconceptions.

    I well agree that length, mass, charge, spin etc. are different. But aren't they quantum numbers alltogether (what regards the first two, some explanatory discussion would be necessary)? And doesn't the existence of quantum numbers „mean" that there are associated symmetries, eventually hopefully reckognized as one single symmetry comprising all of them? Physic appears to me as very homogeneous at the basic level - everything is in terms of symmetries, and any symmetry corresponds to a mathematical group / algebra. This is the case even for theories looking so much different as General Relativity and quantum physics do. Starting from the U(1) group, electric charge is immediately defined without necessary reference to any other physical entity. But I agree that the discovery of charge exactly went the way you discribe: the concepts of length, velocity and force were necessary. The situation is even more intricate: physics hardly will be able to comprehend the entirety of our world - like the aspects associated with Picasso. The only way out I found is pragmatism, thus considering oneself satisfied with what can realistically be achieved at this point in time.

    For such price paid, we possibIy will get something back. I elaborated on this in a paper, which I did not refer to because it still may have some flaws. But in the light of your post, yesterday I put the most recent version on my personal website. At the introduction you find a reference to Keith Devlin's book „Logic and Information", while in the second section I discuss „the Enigma of Information":

    http://magnific.at/r0g/loads/law7.pdf

    One can say without exaggeration that information has remained a mystery. Devlin starts his book with a metapher. He compares us Information-age people with a blacksmith living in the Iron-age. While being very skillful in handling information, we may have no idea of what it actually is. This influenced me strongly and eventually I came to the conjecture that there exists no other meaning - semanticity - than that of numbers. The implication would be a self-consistency relation: nature would encode nothing but its number of degrees of freedom - what only consumes logarithmically few such degrees of freedom. This leaves a vast room for redundancies, what not only explains why there are laws of nature, rather even gives a quantitative measure.

    I have to apologize in advance if I do not quickly respond to further posts. But I need time for reflection to have at least some chance of avoiding bad logic mistakes in my argumentation.

    Gerald

    6 days later

    Dear Gerald,

    Your essay abstract attracted my attention because I also think that information is fundamental to the Universe.

    You have raised some very good points in your essay and I think that you deserve a better score than you actually have.

    I propose a model that describes the Universe as a growing sphere of information. If you have a spare moment you can take a look at it here, you will see that some of your ideas are developped in it.

    You can also take a look at my essay althought it is mainly a list of equations.

    All the best,

    Patrick

    24 days later

    Dear Gerald,

    I think Newton was wrong about abstract gravity; Einstein was wrong about abstract space/time, and Hawking was wrong about the explosive capability of NOTHING.

    All I ask is that you give my essay WHY THE REAL UNIVERSE IS NOT MATHEMATICAL a fair reading and that you allow me to answer any objections you may leave in my comment box about it.

    Joe Fisher