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Quantum mechanics derived from a new theory of information?

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All wrapped up with the neatest bow! No, but despite the hype, at least it’s worth a look:

At the Physics ArXiv blog:

In the new work, Masanes and co put forward four postulates about the Universe. If we accept these, they say, quantum mechanics naturally follows. What’s more, their formulation solves an important question about reality—why the universe relies on quantum mechanics and not one of the numerous similar theories that physicists have recently discovered.

So what are these four postulates? Let’s go through them one by one.

1. The existence of an information unit.

This is the big new idea. It states that information exists, it comes in fundamental units and only in one type so there cannot be different types of information. Masanes and co call this fundamental unit a ‘general bit’ or gbit and say that any aspect of the Universe can be encoded given a sufficient number of them.

This idea has significant implications. If there is only one type of information, then everything in the universe must be possible with it. Or as Masanes and co put it: “Any physical process can be simulated with a suitably programmed general purpose simulator.” More.

It’s nice to see someone exploring this area.

Further:

The problem with information as a fundamental unit is that physicists have never been sure how to think about information. That’s partly because we are surrounded by seemingly different types of information. There are the 0s and 1s of digital code, information in the form of entropy or as the opposite of randomness, genetic information and even the stuff we use for thought and communication.

A reader suggests that Masanes’ thesis may be relevant to William Dembski’s metaphysics of information. Thoughts?

Lluis Masanes: Existence of an information unit as a postulate of quantum theory :

ABSTRACT (from seminar):Does information play a significant role in the foundations of physics? Information is the abstraction that allows us to refer to the states of systems when we choose to ignore the systems themselves. This is only possible in very particular frameworks, like in classical or quantum theory, or more generally, whenever there exists an information unit such that the state of any system can be reversibly encoded in a sufficient number of such units. In this talk I will show how the abstract formalism of quantum theory can be deduced solely from the existence of a suitable information unit, together with two further natural assumptions: the continuity and reversibility of dynamics, and the possibility of characterizing the state of a composite system by local measurements. This constitutes a new set of postulates for quantum theory with a simple and direct physical meaning, like the ones of special relativity or thermodynamics, and it articulates a strong connection between physics and information.

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Comments
Genesis 2:7 "And God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became alive" "And God formed man of the dust of the ground (or the particles that are found in the ground) ...and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (or transferred a life-sustaining energy/force into lifeless particles forming the man's body; just like battery operated doll is motionless until the energy from the battery is applied to its mechanic parts) and man (or the particles forming the man's body) became alive."Quest
December 25, 2014
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Me_Think wrote: "What has teleportation got to do with creation?" Good question Me_Think... You are right that teleportation itself may not have much to do with creation... directly... But let's look at it from another angle... Me_Think: "Do you think in QM ‘teleportation’ is physical transport of particles from one place to another?" No...In the teleportation, quantum entanglement allows for the teleportation or transportation of the quantum state of one set particles to the other; between two particle chambers mentioned in the video... Obviously the particles themselves are not teleported... it is the INFORMATION about their quantum state that is... Me_Think: "How do you connect Quantum entanglement to creation ?" As spooky as it may sound the act of creation could have very well been an act of "teleportation" of the INFORMATION of the quantum state of particles previously arranged or designed... Simply put... Designer/God could have designed a living organism starting with its blueprint; the body plans first … Then he adds the calculated major components and the many different organs that will support the function of the organism… Then he chooses the many different types of cells that will perform the necessary functions to make the essential organs to function properly… and so on… I think the keys here are; 1. The information about the arrangement of the particles and the quantum state of each particle that need to form the organism… 2. The only difference between the teleportation and the act of creation is that the act of teleportation involves some kind of a scanning process of particles of a living organism and then the teleportation of the information about their quantum state... The act of creation only involves the teleportation/transformation of the information about the quantum state of the particles that form a living organism...Quest
December 24, 2014
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Quest @ 15
Quantum entanglement has been used for the teleportation method of photons….. Why not quantum entanglement for the act of creation…? My theory is just as good as any other available at least for the origins of life… or rather a bit better… The origins of life theories are based on nonsense…
What has teleportation got to do with creation ? Do you think in QM 'teleportation' is physical transport of particles from one place to another? How do you connect Quantum entanglement to creation ?Me_Think
December 23, 2014
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Me_Think wrote: "Quest @ 10 Pick and mix from a chamber of particles to create organisms.That’s profound insight." And why not...? Have you been provided with many theories as to how the Designer/God could have done it...? Maybe you are not the right person to ask but I have not heard many theories regarding the act of creation based at least on some science... Quantum entanglement has been used for the teleportation method of photons... In theory.... for now... the teleportation of matter and living organisms could also be possible in the future considering the laws of quantum physics... Check it out on the 40 min mark... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtYfz72MmtM Many physicists but especially Zelinger think such an event is just a matter or time (and technology I should add)... Why not quantum entanglement for the act of creation...? My theory is just as good as any other available at least for the origins of life... or rather a bit better... The origins of life theories are based on nonsense... At least I try to use an existing and well documented laws of quantum physics... All you have to do is prove me wrong... but how can you...? No matter how we look at the origins of life... loads of information are needed to have been available BEFORE the beginning of life in the first place... but the origin of information is the problem for materialists...Quest
December 23, 2014
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Quest @ 10 Pick and mix from a chamber of particles to create organisms.That's profound insight.Me_Think
December 23, 2014
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Typo alert…!!! Silly-simply I’m still getting used to my new tablet that can’t think...Quest
December 22, 2014
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Typo alert...!!! Silly-simply I'm still getting used to my new tablet that can't think...Quest
December 22, 2014
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1 In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things came into being, not one thing came into being except through him. 4 What has come into being in him was life, life that was the light of men; 5 and light shines in darkness, and darkness could not overpower it.buffalo
December 21, 2014
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Creation ands Quantum Mechanics Quite a while ago I have promised on this blog to provide some insight as to how the Designer/God could have created life forms as whole living organisms without using the process of evolution… I'm sorry for the delay... Why do I think the act of creation had to have happened that way…? Here are some clues: 1. There is no doubt in my mind that the living cell is irreducibly complex… What I mean by that and I’m pretty sure Mike Behe would agree with me on this… is that ALL COMPONENTS OF A LIVING CELL HAVE TO BE PRESENT for the living cell to function properly… as enzymes are needed to produce ATP but energy from ATP is needed to produce enzymes... DNA is required to make enzymes, but enzymes are required to make DNA... Proteins can be made only by a cell, but a cell can be made only with specific proteins… To me these simple facts cannot be explained by any evolutionary scenario… 2.Endosymbiosis theory disaster tells me that there is no evolutionary explanation for the transition from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells… Some genes would have to come from outer-space and there is no lab test proving that is process is even plausible… 3. The total lack of intermediates and the monkeys turning out to be soooo dumb and unable to learn any kind of human speech… 4.100 more… it just doesn’t work for me… So… to me it is obvious that the Designer/God must have done it ALL At ONCE… and that is how the Bible describes it… (it is kid of funny but I recommend never to bet against the Bible...) I have lost a lot of money trying to prove it wrong... I have been thinking about that for a long time and one day it was The Breakthrough... I watching PBS about the bizarre world of quantum mechanics… and it hit me… ...We are made of particles…all life is made of particles… Quantum entanglement gives us an idea… insight… as to how the act of creation could have taken place… To understand it better... I will use the “teleportation” that in theory is possible due to quantum entanglement… Please watch the video first starting at the 40 min mark… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtYfz72MmtM After watching the video…please imagine someone… who controls the particle chambers… Someone who had preprogramed the arrangement of particles… He possesses the INFORMATION that those particles need to be arranged in such a way...so that they can compose or form a living body... BTW: If someone possesses the info for the arrangement of particles in the chambers… Can he also make them come in and out of existence.... even if they "stop functioning"…? Simply said… if certain arrangement of particles dissolves or silly dies… according to quantum mechanics it is possible to rearrange it... or silly put the resurrection o the pile of particles is certainly possible… All one needs is information… and particle chambers entangled with each other… To me this is more than a theory…Quest
December 21, 2014
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I don't think this should be all that surprising. After all, wasn't it Callen that derived thermodynamics from information theory?Mung
December 19, 2014
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OT: Model of Nuclear Pore Complex transport selectivity - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyhqLpjicZgbornagain77
December 19, 2014
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Of related note: Quantum physics just got less complicated - Dec. 19, 2014 Excerpt: Patrick Coles, Jedrzej Kaniewski, and Stephanie Wehner,,, found that 'wave-particle duality' is simply the quantum 'uncertainty principle' in disguise, reducing two mysteries to one.,,, "The connection between uncertainty and wave-particle duality comes out very naturally when you consider them as questions about what information you can gain about a system. Our result highlights the power of thinking about physics from the perspective of information,",,, Wave-particle duality is the idea that a quantum object can behave like a wave, but that the wave behaviour disappears if you try to locate the object. It's most simply seen in a double slit experiment,,, where single particles, electrons, say, are fired one by one at a screen containing two narrow slits. The particles pile up behind the slits not in two heaps as classical objects would, but in a stripy pattern like you'd expect for waves interfering. At least this is what happens until you sneak a look at which slit a particle goes through - do that and the interference pattern vanishes. The quantum uncertainty principle is the idea that it's impossible to know certain pairs of things about a quantum particle at once. For example, the more precisely you know the position of an atom, the less precisely you can know the speed with which it's moving. It's a limit on the fundamental knowability of nature, not a statement on measurement skill. The new work shows that how much you can learn about the wave versus the particle behaviour of a system is constrained in exactly the same way.,,, Wave-particle duality and uncertainty have been fundamental concepts in quantum physics since the early 1900s.,,, It's possible to write equations that capture how much can be learned about pairs of properties that are affected by the uncertainty principle. Coles, Kaniewski and Wehner,, discovered that all the maths previously used to describe wave-particle duality could be reformulated in terms of these relations. "It was like we had discovered the 'Rosetta Stone' that connected two different languages," says Coles. "The literature on wave-particle duality was like hieroglyphics that we could now translate into our native tongue. We had several eureka moments when we finally understood what people had done," he says. http://phys.org/news/2014-12-quantum-physics-complicated.htmlbornagain77
December 19, 2014
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As to Man's ability to understand and communicate information: Leading Evolutionary Scientists Admit We Have No Evolutionary Explanation of Human Language - Casey Luskin - December 19, 2014 Excerpt: Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,, (Marc Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky and Richard C. Lewontin, "The mystery of language evolution," Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 5:401 (May 7, 2014).) It's difficult to imagine much stronger words from a more prestigious collection of experts. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2014/12/leading_evoluti092141.htmlbornagain77
December 19, 2014
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Let's say my SUV is running at 100 mph. All you have to do is convert the state of SUV, traffic , road, speed traps ,friction, weather and general environment to 'gbits' and you can arrive at the temporal model of SUV in Quantum state. This is wonderfully simple - isn't it? Now imagine doing this for the entire world's state. It is quite simple :-)Me_Think
December 18, 2014
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I'm not sure whether it helps the information theory but in this video there is mention of wave "memory" that would essentially store information about the past. Through the Wormhole - Wave/Particle - Silicon Droplets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUBaBdl0Aw&feature=youtu.be&t=2m24sGary S. Gaulin
December 18, 2014
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OT: Molecular Biology Animations – Demo Reel https://vimeo.com/114883955bornagain77
December 18, 2014
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Dembski puts Information upstream from Matter. "Matter is a myth" as he writes in "Being as Communion". Masanes writes that information is "the bedrock of reality". I would think Dembski would agree, although might disagree about how that bedrock was created. So, is this gbit material or immaterial? I'll assume it massless?ppolish
December 18, 2014
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as to: "“Any physical process can be simulated with a suitably programmed general purpose simulator.” This seems like old news: Digital Physics Argument for God's Existence - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2Xsp4FRgas Digital Physics Argument Premise 1: Simulations can only exist is a computer or a mind. Premise 2: The universe is a simulation. Premise 3: A simulation on a computer still must be simulated in a mind. Premise 4: Therefore, the universe is a simulation in a mind (2,3). Premise 5: This mind is what we call God. Conclusion: Therefore, God exists.bornagain77
December 18, 2014
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