On 02.02.2012 20:00 meekerdb said the following:
On 2/2/2012 10:35 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
Yes, but when we speak about information carrier (book, a hard
drive, DVD, flash memory) it is exactly the same. And it has
nothing to do with the total number of physical states in the
device, as this example with zero temperature nicely shows.
That's not true. The arrangement of ink on the page, the embossed
face of the coin, do contribute to the physical states. It's just
that the information encoded by them are infinitesimal compared to
the information required to define the microscopic states, e.g. the
vibrational mode of every atom. So when we're concerned with heat
energy that changes the vibrational modes we neglect the pattern of
ink and the emobossing. And when we're reading we are only interested
in the information conveyed by a well defined channel, and we ignored
what information might be encoded in the mircroscopic states. But the
two are both present.
Brent.
Yes, I agree with this, but I think it changes nothing with the term
information. We have a number of physical states in a carrier (that is
influenced indeed by for example the arrangement of ink on the page) and
we have the information capability as defined by the company that sells
the carrier.
By the way, the example with the zero temperature (or strictly speaking
with temperature going to zero Kelvin) seems to show that the
information capability could be even more than the number of physical
states.
Evgenii
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