On 17 October 2014 19:17, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 5:18 PM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> > there was no one around in the big bang that we know of, yet it would >> appear any maths that might be involved in physical processes managed to >> work OK. >> > > Yes, but to math make the Big Bang or did the Big Bang make the math? I > don't know and I'm not going to pretend that I do. >
I don't see how the big bang could make 2+2=4. Are you saying that in another big bang, 2+2=5? If not I can't see that your comment has any meaning. > > > By the way, what is the "recent discovery that information is physical"? >> > > 1961 is pretty recent and in that year Landauer discovered that the > absolute minimum energy it takes to erase one bit of information is > ln(2)kT , k is Boltzmann's constant 1.381 X10^-23 J/K, and T is the > temperature of the computer in degrees Kelvin. In 1972 Bekenstein > discovered that the maximum amount of information you can put inside a > sphere is proportional not to it's volume as you might expect but to it's > surface area, and it's 2PI*R*E/h*c*ln2 where R is the radius of the sphere, > E is the mass-energy inside the sphere h is Planck's constant and c is the > speed of light. > > That isn't quite the same as discovering that information is physical (if it was, Wheeler wouldn't have propesed "It from bit"). It shows that the storage of information in a universe with our laws of physics entails certain requirements. If one is going to darw any conclusions, I'd say it's that infprmation is more *fundamental* than we have previously assumed. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
