Information: From Quantum Theory to Wiki-Leaks

Information: From Quantum Theory to Wiki-Leaks

Basics

Information can be defined in several ways. If you ask a physicist or an engineer they will say that information is a quantity akin to mass, energy, or temperature and is always tied to physical matter. If you ask a statistician, you may hear that information is condensed data, with meaningful patterns extracted in the form of averages, standard deviations, dispersion, etc. In common terms of everyday life information can be defined as a content of data that reduces uncertainty.

The theory of information was born with the works of Claude Elwood Shannon, an MIT master's student, and later a researcher with Bell Laboratories with his publication titled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in 1948. His work set up mathematical models that described the production and transmission of information and dealt with a question of how much information could be transmitted in a given message. This is also where term "bit" first appeared defining a binary digit, a 0 or 1, and replaced the term "bigit", which was common at the time in Boolean algebra. The Shannon's work originated in response to AT&T wanting to know how many telephone conversations could be packed into a copper wire. Since then the theory has evolved with the work of many mathematicians, scientists and cryptographers and is now considered the major body of knowledge closely related to quantum theory.

Quantum theory is a science of elementary particles, how can it be related to information? Well, each particle carries a set of data about itself such as charge, spin, momentum, mass, etc. Over its life span, however short in the physical world, a particle may collide with other particles, i.e. transfer information about itself. Even if you take extreme effort to isolate one particle somewhere thousands of light years away, put it into a black box in a vacuum made of absolutely non-reflective material at absolute zero degrees temperature, your particle would still exchange information with the physical world by way of the vacuum fluctuations (vacuum energy). This is the direct result of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle postulating that anywhere there is time, there is energy. Tiny particles of the universe that constantly appear in and out of our 3D space are probing objects and distribute information about them in an attempt to equalize entropy. Now what's the entropy? In modern terms, entropy is a quantity that describes the probability of distribution of "stuff" in a closed system (think gas particles). The more "ordered" a system is, the less entropy it has, and the more "disordered" or evenly distributed the "stuff" is inside the system, the more the entropy of the system. Since information is always attached to a physical medium (and as a consequence cannot travel faster than the speed of light), natural tendency of any system is to increase its entropy, or to distribute information about arrangement of its particles as equally in the 3D space as possible. In this way, the nature is in constant attempt to have equal probability of distribution of "stuff" in any given volume, and since information is always attached to physical objects what is going on is distribution of information. You cannot hide anything. Presence of any particle in 3D immediately becomes "known" by way of interaction with other particles. We can also say that information about any particle in 3D immediately gets distributed due to the vacuum fluctuations. Another conclusion that can be drawn is that by distributing information, the entropy of the universe is increased as well. Therefore you can think of entropy as a mysterious "documentation" device. The documentation part is where you have to spend energy and to increase entropy if you erase a bit of information out of the physical space (see works of Rolf Landauer).

Information entropy is what will keep governments transparent - more Wikileaks.on the way?

As information obeys the laws of entropy, or the tendency to its even distribution and the fact that it is always attached to physical objects, it is impossible to resist its spread unless energy is applied to preserve it. You could extrapolate this statement a little further. Any government with its files stored on physical media is a collection of information in a much larger system (human society) with relatively low information entropy. Now think of the modern society with millions of people wanting to fill their brains with informational content, availability of broad-band communication channels, and disseminated nature of the communications industry - you will get a very fluid and responsive system that can sense information about physical objects inside of it pretty quickly. This is akin to the prior example, where anything anywhere is hit by the vacuum fluctuations with information about the "anything" leaking out. The vacuum fluctuation in this case is human attention. The governments who stray too far from their surroundings (be it their country's population or neighboring countries), or governments who are trying to restrain the free distribution of information about themselves, use up more and more energy to resist natural increase in entropy. This can manifest in growing number of government employees, higher taxes on communications channels, covert surveillance, etc. These acts are done to maintain a state of decreased entropy or "order". The more distant the government cluster is trying to be from its surrounding population, the more energy is required to keep it in that state. Question is how much energy is really needed, and since population of any country is finite, the governments who elect to stay out of equilibrium would have tough time to "make ends meet" eventually. This typically manifests in aggression (either internal or external) in an attempt to access more energy, or results in collapse. What's the solution? To be transparent and to be at equilibrium with your population and neighboring countries. Any attempt to control dissipation and distribution of information is ultimately futile. Any attempt to control natural course of societal development is ultimately futile as well. As momentum in information distribution builds, it will overwhelm anyone's attempts to control and restrain it.

Nature of life, you are a channel of energy

We are channels of energy inscribed with patterns of information. The patterns manifest themselves from the way we look, to the way we think, to the way events (and which kind) happen to us. In this context the energy can be thought of the God energy or the God-force. In the physical sense, we fight-off entropy within our own bodies, staying in defined physical shape and not decaying. The energy that helps us do just that is the energy of the Sun. The energy that allows us to exist is the God-force. Think of this: imagine you have a computer. One day you decide to write a program that will sort digital marbles in a certain way to build colorful mosaic patterns. Marbles randomly appear on screen and are made available by another program. You also program a condition that in order for the program to process the marbles to build a pattern, it needs to seek food packets which are spread around the screen. Once the program "eats" a packet, it gets units of energy that are converted into the useful enterprise of putting the colorful patterns together. You run the program, and it works great! It does put some interesting patterns together, in a somewhat random fashion, but they look cool. You spread around some more packets and more beautiful mosaic patterns appear. The computer where your program operates is its universe. The program lives in computer memory has two degrees of freedom, defined as two dimensions of the screen. The marbles are the information the program processes, and the packets you spread around are its food. You in a way now act as the Sun giving its energy that originates as your volition to add more food for the program. All is swell. However (you have probably guessed it). The program will run so long as there is electricity in your house. If somebody flips the power switch, your entire creation with all its output and food packets will be gone into nothingness. The electrical energy that ran your computer and pushed bits and bytes around its circuits was in a way the God-force, without your little program would not be alive.

Now let's get back to the information theory. Every information channel has an inherent transmitting capacity. You can think of any entity that can be said of being "alive" as a transmitting channel that manifests the universal energy or the God-force. All living entities transmit it, and have inherent capacities for its manifestation. Some channels are quite clear, and some are terribly noisy. Sometimes the noise levels get so high that we are not even able to distinguish the message being transmitted - it is garbled and can represent pretty much anything. Your uncertainty about the content is sky-high. Now let's think of a pure you, when you were just born. I bet it a pretty sight. Your body contained a lot of clear well-defined content about you. Now as you were growing up you have picked up myriads of information patterns with majority of them running in your brain now and every day, even without you consciously knowing about them. How many of them don't quite suit you? What are the ones that are very old and don't reflect the reality anymore? Which ones make you think/act certain way? This is the noise that garbles your messages and lessens your capacity as the medium of the God-force.

In XIX century, French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered the germ theory of disease. He proposed that most infections were caused by tiny micro-organisms called germs. In light of the information theory it can be said that germs introduce or carry information patterns incompatible with patterns of a healthy body. As information is always tied to a physical medium, it can be said that disease is caused by bad information patterns which manifest in the form of germs. How much bad information is in our brains ready to dissipate into neighboring population of cells of other organs? How much information incompatible with your digestion program do you take in with your food? Do cancer patients have bad information clusters tied to some of their cells? Remember, information is the invisible, intangible property like energy or electric charge. Wouldn't it be helpful to have an anti-virus program that would neutralize those patterns? A sort of filter that would protect you? That's what the good habits and happiness are for. Good habits rid you and limit your exposure to noisy patterns, and happiness is a natural state you feel once you increase your transmitting capacity of the God-force. In this way, the task at hand can be the measurement of happiness in order to get clear idea of how your "antivirus" program is operating. How do you measure happiness? This will be a theme for some next posts. To begin, you can simply resort to the "don't worry - be happy" principle.

"Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed"

Jeremy Campbell, the British journalist and science writer said the following about information as the fundamental component in nature:

"The view arose of information as an active agent, something that does not just sit there passively, but "informs" the material world, much as the messages of the genes instruct the machinery of the cell to build an organism... Thus information emerged as a universal principle at work in the world, giving shape to shapeless, specifying the peculiar character of living forms and even helping to determine, by means of special codes, the patterns of human thought... Evidently nature can no longer be seen as matter and energy alone. Nor can all her secrets be unlocked with the keys of chemistry and physics... A third component is needed for any explanation of the world that claims to be complete. To the powerful theories of chemistry and physics must be added a late arrival: a theory of information. Nature must be interpreted as matter, energy, and information."

Our ability to perceive reality depends on processing apparatus that takes data from outside world. In today's modern scientific experimental realm, something does not exist if it cannot be perceived (data collected about it). However with the development of modeling techniques, it became possible to model abstract objects taken from mathematics. Basically, data is a photography of the universe and the world around us. Our depth of perception depends on how good of the datascopes (computing power and appropriate mathematical models) we have at our disposal.

Eli Denver - Dedicated to lifestyle that will give you powers of the next generation - http://elidenver.wordpress.com/

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_(By Eli Denver).