Dear John, Sorry you have been ill.
I agree fully with your statement: All of these explanations, and even stating the problem, require information notions, not just energy as in classical physics. What I object to are statements or implications that information, whether in boundaries or not, is ontologically prior to and/or independent of energy. This is how the positions of people like Lloyd and Tegmark come out, giving 'computation' an agential, anthropomorphically flavored role at the ground of the universe. The establishment by Wu Kun and others of information as a category implies separation only in classical logic and category theory, which are just as limiting as the classical physics John refers to. A basic problem is the inability of people to keep in mind the operation of two aspects of phenomena, cooperative and antagonistic, at the same time. Computers work according to algorithms. The ground of the universe, in my view, is in the tension, not the separation, between being and non-being, and no algorithm can handle that (now who is being anthropomorphic?!) Cheers, Joseph ----- Original Message ----- From: John Collier To: fis Sent: Saturday, January 30, 2016 4:58 PM Subject: [Fis] Information Conservation in black holes List, Sorry I haven’t been able to respond to the interesting remarks on my last post, but it took a while to digest them, and my current health concerns take up a lot of my time, so I haven’t had time to come up with responses that are properly thought out. In the meantime, here is an interesting Nature news report about Hawking’s (and Strominger’s) recent proposal for how information can be preserved in black holes (which his 1976 paper set up as a problem for the laws of physics, which imply information conservation at the most basic level. The solution involves a way empty space can carry information in QM via “soft particles”. The answer is apparently not completely worked out as yet, and there are critics. http://www.nature.com/news/hawking-s-latest-black-hole-paper-splits-physicists-1.19236?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20160128&spMailingID=50572206&spUserID=MTc2NjY1MTQ2NQS2&spJobID=843774519&spReportId=ODQzNzc0NTE5S0 Seth Lloyd described a different possible explanation in his book Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos, Knopf (2000) that involves taking into consideration the information in boundaries, which I found plausible, since the information preservation in physics follows from consideration of basic laws together with the constraints of boundary conditions, neither alone. Perhaps the two approaches are not really distinct. They may eventually cast light on each other. For the time being the Hawking/Strominger proposal also looks like it can solve the “firewall” problem as well, which has the Black Hole boundary being very hot (again, contrary to physical expectations), because information can be transferred into radiation instead of energy, so the information transfer doesn’t require a high temperature at the black hole boundary, unlike other forms of radiation production. All of these explanations, and even stating the problem, require information notions, not just energy as in classical physics. John Collier Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Associate University of KwaZulu-Natal http://web.ncf.ca/collier -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
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