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My question is about physical information and whether or not it is something real or merely fancy math. My problem is that physicists seem to talk as if information is real - however when they describe what it is they make it sound like it's merely a mathematical abstraction.

For example, if a bowling ball were to fall into a black hole, the physical bowling ball disappears from our universe completely - however (according to Hawkings) the bowling balls physical information is stored in two dimensions in the event horizon.

This is very similar to how the idea of information is used in the Universe is a hologram theory - in which our universe is a three dimensional representation of two dimensional information.

The question I have is: Is this information real or is it just mathematical BS? I mean, if my cat is merely the 3D representation of 2D information about my cat - then where is this information and what is it? Is it energy? Is it potential? Is it whatever determines whether or not a quark spins to the left or to the right? Or is it merely fancy math?

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  • Is probability "real" or just fancy math? It is real enough in statistical or quantum mechanics, but it does not pull us down like gravity. Certain parts of advanced physical theories are mathematical abstractions, and they are as "real" as the theories they belong to. Mathematicians talk about sets, numbers and functions as if they were "real" too. – Conifold Sep 30 '16 at 01:17

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This is a topic that is often glossed over in science, because it is very nuanced.

A philosopher would characterize science as a field under epistemology, the study of knowledge. It answers questions about what we can know. Ontology is the study of what is "real." However, what can we say about reality in the first place? It turns out that we can say very little. Due to many philosophical concepts, epistemology can say nothing about the real world without an ontological assumption. Philosophy has many of these, such as the infamous "I think therefore I am." Once you accept particular assumptions about your reality, you can use your knowledge to make more statements about reality.

Science is empirical. Empiricism is a subset of epistemology. Thus, a philosopher would state that science does not tell you anything about reality. However, even the most hearty of skeptics will agree that you can't stop there. It does a disservice to science. It's important to explore what science does claim, and to see how close it gets to ontology.

Science's knowledge is in the form of predictive models. Science claims that, if you can measure "reality," capturing part of it in a set of numbers (like lengths and masses), then you can use that information and their mathematical models to predict what you might measure in the future.

The power of science is that it identifies behaviors in "reality" which appear so consistent and reliable that you can almost claim they are true. As an example, F=ma is incredibly reliable (on reasonable scales). If you can show that you can measure a mass and measure a force, you can reasonably believe you can predict its accelerations. More importantly, if you have a much more complicated structure, such as a truss or a body of flowing water, you can use these simple building blocks (like F=ma) to make predictions about the entire complicated structure.

More importantly, the power of science is that these predictions are pretty astonishingly good. Science has a track record for being one of the most effective tools humanity has for exploring physical phenomena. When an engineer uses science to state that a sky-scraper will withstand an earthquake, they are right remarkably often!

Some of the challenge that has arisen is that science is so effective at predicting that people start to talk about it as though it is actually true. Philosophy calls this process abduction (contrasting with deduction and induction). Induction is accepting that the "best" theory is actually true. In many cases, science is such a good predictor of physical phenomena that we engage in abduction and declare it to be the "true" reality we live in.

Most good scientists are well aware of this issue. They are aware that their theories can be wrong. However, despite this, we still talk in ontological terms. We still talk about what "really" would happen. This is partly due to language. Natural languages never evolved to deal with predictions that are just this good, so the language required to accurately depict the uncertainty just isn't there. I would claim that, contextually, it is assumed that all statements written in a scientific form come with the assumption that they are derived from a set of axioms, and the results may be invalid if one of those axioms is invalidated.

So in the end, the information in the hologram you speak of is exactly as real as science's model of the cat you threw into the black hole in the first place (okay, I admit it, you had two different parts to this question, one with black holes, one with cats. I just stitched the two together). Science provides an answer which says "if you act as though your cat is encoded as 'information' on the surface of the black hole, science states the predictions which arise from that model will be very consistent with any measurements you take in reality."

Now how good is this prediction? It's a pretty extreme situation. Black holes are very hard to study, and cats dislike being thrown into them. However, scientists are constantly striving to explore more extreme situations. We dive deeper into quantum mechanics. We dive deeper into relativistic environments. From this work, the behavior you describe above, with the cat turning into information, is the best model the scientific community can provide you. It's up to you to throw the cat in and find out!

So is science reality? We don't know. It's entirely possible that the physical world we see in scientific theories is actually the real world. However, at a philosophical level, we can never prove that. We do have to recognize that scientific theory appears to be notably consistent with reality. We don't really know what happens when you throw a cat in a black hole in reality, but if I had to predict what would happen before I did it, I'd rely on the models science provides.

Okay, maybe I lied a bit. I'd probably also rely on models provided by the Humane Society.

Cort Ammon
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From the point of view of quantum field theory, the only difference between you and complete vacuum is the arrangement of quantum fields. Namely, you and vacuum ("nothing" in a layman's language) are made of the same "things", the only difference is how you configure these "things". That's information.

pathintegral
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  • OK - and correct me if I'm wrong - but would "information" be similar to the way code works in a computer simulation. For example, in a simulation if I want to simulate gravity I need to write a line of code that tells the computer what gravity is, how it works, how strong it is and how fast things fall within gravity wells. If I want to simulate a rock I have to write a line of code telling the computer what a rock is and what its properties are. Is that how "information" works in the actual universe? – Joshua Flaugher Sep 29 '16 at 22:19
  • @JoshuaFlaugher Information as you describe it there is nuanced. For example, there's no need to write a line of code that tells the computer what gravity is if the hardware it is operating on happens to have an effect akin to gravity built into it. The concept to research on this is Komolgov complexity. – Cort Ammon Sep 29 '16 at 22:51
  • @JoshuaFlaugher Believe it or not, the "code" for the universe is astonishingly simple (compared with tens of thousands of lines of actual codes), although we don't know all of it yet. As far as we know, it is completely determined some symmetry requirements (known in physics as "the standard model", which, unfortunately, does not include gravity yet even though we have some ideas). What I meant by "information" is more like the input parameters of your code. Whether it is a cat, or a single electron, they are just different ways to excite a vacuum, whose evolution in time obey the same rule. – pathintegral Sep 30 '16 at 00:19