Dear Pedro, Dear FISers, In our search for the "foundations of information" two years ago, we looked at Michael Conrad's fluctuon model of the universe. We came to the conclusion, I think, that 1) any coupling of fluctuations in the quantum vacuum to thermodynamic entities (biological macromolecules) has not been confirmed and 2) the concept of information as energy does not apply to the "timeless" vacuum background. Roger Penrose's 2011 book, Cycles of Time, which I have just read, presents a new view of the universe as described by a conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC). It makes some remarkable statements about information which I believe are worth discussion. His key point is to make information loss in black holes the condition for the reduction in the phase-space volume of the universe to permit geometrical matching between a De Sitter "end" of one universe or aeon and the smooth transition to an Einsteinian Big Bang in a new aeon, both involving massless particles. Penrose thus goes back to Hawking's original theory, as he finds it difficult to see how any real structural information can be maintained outside the black hole by the photons leaking through. Deterministic unitary "Schroedinger" evolution must be accompanied by probabilistic processes, as is also clear from Lupasco. Also clear is that as matter evaporates, the associated space (and time) collapses to the necessary conformity for which Penrose gives good mathematics, without violation of the 2nd Law as in other cyclic models. Mass reappears in the new aeon under the influence of something like a Higgs field. The other remarkable statement is in the text of Fig. 3.1, page 142, which reads as follows: "Photons and other (effectively) massless particles/fields can propagate smoothly from an earlier pre-Big Bang phase into the current post-Big Bang phase or, conversely, we can propagate the particle/field information backwards from post- to pre-Big Bang phase (italics mine)." Taken at face value, this might tend to confirm that particles/fields, that is, energy, are different from the information about them but inseparable from it, as some of us have argued. I would be very interested to know how some of you interpret these concepts. There is a formal resemblance to Feynmann's concept of anti-particles being normal particles moving backward in time. However, I am not at all sure that the analogy helps because it refers to thermodynamic time and this is exactly what disappears in the cosmological framework. Thank you and best wishes, Joseph
_______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
