Is information the fifth state of matter?

[_Nat_]

This seems like confusion over [the map/territory relationship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation ):

> "A map is not the territory"

Whatever reality might be considered to involve -- mass, energy, entropy, time, whatever -- it's information that we actually consider in our minds.

In grade-school physics, it may be all too easy to confuse the map for the territory, because everything's just so simple that students might feel little compulsion to put much thought into things. But it's always been information.

If someone wants a string 2-meters long, they might measure out two lengths of 1-meter strings, then tie them together. If the result isn't close enough to 2-meters, then they might reason that they ought to be more precise -- they ought to better measure the 1-meter strings, consider the length-contraction due to tying the knot, and so forth. And then, they might think that there's a difference between the string and their information about it.

But further away, in more exotic contexts like in sub-atomic quantum-mechanical arenas or near black-holes, there might be less intuition about the things like strings -- folks may be pushing harder, working more heavily with information without a background sense of naturalness. Inferences may be drawn based on information, and then more built upon that information, until it seems like it's all information.

But, to be clear, this isn't some new quality of reality; it's how stuff's always worked. It's just how intellectual-computation works. It's just that, when things were simpler, folks didn't care to consider it.

That said, reality isn't quite "information"; it's just our perceptions of reality that're information. This is, reality's the territory, and our conceptions of it are the map. More involved computational-modeling just helps make that more apparent by undermining more naive modes of thinking about it.

[cgio]

I think there is an inversion here, though. The question implicit in this context is not whether the map is the territory, but whether the territory is the map. Now one can see these as homophonic statements, but is this the case? When is it or not?

[inopinatus]

All matter is information, all information is functional, and perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe.

(in the Greg Egan edition of this thesis, the speed of light emerges as a property of evaluative propagation through a functional universe, and new forms of consciousness are encountered living within the Lisp machine of the cosmos)

[amelius]

> All matter is information, all information is functional, and perception is therefore the lazy evaluation of the universe.

If the universe is deterministic, then there is no information (everything can be computed from the initial conditions).

[infogulch]

> [matter-antimatter annihilation] converts all the mass of the annihilating particles into energy, typically gamma photons. However, if the particles do contain information, then this also needs to be conserved upon annihilation, producing some lower-energy photons. In the present study, I predicted the exact energy of the infrared red photons resulting from this information erasure, and I gave a detailed protocol for the experimental testing involving the electron-positron annihilation process.

Neat.

[chroma]

Looking at the paper linked to in the article[1], I'm having a hard time not dismissing this immediately. There are several implications to this theory:

- Information has mass.

- Information cannot exist at absolute zero.

Does this mean that bringing a hard drive to absolute zero changes its mass and erases its contents? Does the information somehow come back after the drive is warmed up? Also there are many ways to represent information: magnetic charges on a spinning platter, electrical charges in SSDs, physical impressions on metal, graphite on paper, etc. Do all of these get destroyed at absolute zero? I don't know how that's reconcilable with the rest of physics.

1. https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794

[jmf1sh]

Former mathematical physicist here. I haven't read the article yet so don't take this comment as a defense nor as a rebuttal, but I just want to point out that your reasons for immediate dismissal are not obviously valid.

- The Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy directly relates information to entropy. There has been an "it from bit" program (and more recently "it from qubit") dating back decades that tries to treat information as somehow fundamental with matter/energy emergent. The jury is still out, but I wouldn't consider it to be particularly controversial (at least not moreso than other speculative theoretical physics).

- To me it seems absolutely physically plausible that cooling a hard drive to absolute zero would destroy its contents. As another example, you can destroy the information contained in DNA at much warmer temperatures than absolute zero. Why would heating it back up restore the information? Most thermodynamic processes are irreversible. And by the way, thermodynamic irreversibility is related to entropy change, which is a measure of information lost.

[traskjd]

Armchair interest only, so please tell me if I'm wrong or at least we theorize how I could be wrong.

My understanding is that even in the full vacuum of space, we do not get to absolute zero. Quantum fluctuations keep it ever so slightly above it.

So perhaps information does actually not exist at absolute zero?

[colechristensen]

An atom cannot be at absolute zero, it is an unreachable extreme and all sorts of weird quantum effects go on as you try harder and harder.

[rcxdude]

The connection between information entropy and thermodynamics entropy is pretty well established, as well as theories which relate the destruction of information to irreversability. This part of the article is actually not particularly controversial. The idea of a storage device gaining some mass when information in placed on it is not particularly new, but it is something which would be extremely difficult to measure. In terms of the question of absolute zero, you have to consider that the physical reality of a system at zero temperature (truely zero, not femtokelvin) and thus zero entropy is extremely weird: it would basically require a perfect crystal lattice extending infinitely in all directions. This is one of the reasons why it can't be reached. So the answer is basically that if you were to cool a hard disk to absolute zero (which is impossible), it would first require turning it into something not recognisable as a hard disk. (And if you're thinking we've come close to absolute zero in experiments, remember that the difference in scales between thermodynamic information/entropy and other information (even the information contained in the shape of a solid object, let alone any amount of information our current technology could store) is incredibly vast: the temperatures reached in labs don't really come close to that.

So while this is still basically a theoretical idea (and likely will stay that way for some time without a very clever experimental design and a lot of resources: notice they basically propose building a LIGO to perform their experiment), it's not as weird as you might think, and the ways in which it is apparently weird reflect a weirdness that is already present in thermodynamics.

[doctoboggan]

As far as I understand it nothing can really ever be at absolute zero, it can only be asymptotically approached.

[readthenotes1]

5th? There seems to be some information missing in the title. Maybe not a massive amount.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_of_matter

[jdrc]

I think they misused "state of matter" to mean "fundamental property".

[IncRnd]

I think they were referencing solid, liquid, gas, plasma, information as five natural states of matter.

[gfodor]

Here's the link to the (recently published) experiment proposal paper: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0087175

[7373737373]

What does it mean for an electron to have e.g. 1.509 bits of information?

[JohnHaugeland]

Until you can cause phase shifts of other matter to and from information, it's an obvious no.

Oh, you're going to take a liquid, bake it into information, then freeze it back into a liquid? Cool, cool

[pieter_mj]

Unless you're gonna call the natural laws an emergent property of matter, I'd say it's the first state.

[abeppu]

> Since every particle is supposed to contain information, which supposedly has its own mass, then that information has to go somewhere when the particle is annihilated. In this case, the information should be converted into low-energy infrared photons.

How does this compare to the very very low amount of heat released when a bit is erased under Landauer's principle? How many bits does a particle store? Does it store its location? Does the number of bits needed to store that depend on a choice of units, frame of reference, and resolution?

(edited typo)

[klik99]

A couple of questions from someone struggling to put this in more relatable terms:

Isn't information in theoretical physics just mean something that repeats, or perhaps relatable, in some way - for example an underlying structure similar to other structures - and in that sense is measurable information another form of describing mass/energy, like moving between frequency and time domain in signals? (side note: could the significance of information be a by product of using math to describe physics, as math can only describe properties of repeating systems, so high information is equilivant to being easily captured in mathematical terms)

And on his experiment, assuming his theory is correct - why would a hard drive represent "pure data", such that writing to it would constitute adding an exact measure of information to mass? For example, in an erased state the drive would have ambient information from surrounding electrical fields, is there some mechanism to erase the drive that ensures it lacks any information? And why would data that a computer can read not be inefficient in some way and contain information irrelevant to the hard drives usage, causing it to measure higher even if this exact mass of information is correct? The weights seem so small that even the smallest bit of environmental interference would make this experiment fail.

[adonovan]

This seems to be a pet theory of one researcher (Vopson). Have any other physicists written anything about it, supportive or critical?

[zamalek]

My pet hypothesis is that information is the wave, and particles are just particles. For example, the information about an entangled pair propagates at (or above) the speed of light the instant that they are created. Therefore, the shared state would already be determined at the place of measurement.

Also, wouldn't a full hard drive weight less than an empty one (unless "empty" means initialized to all zeroes)?

[quirkot]

Either this uses the word "information" in a way that is 99% divorced from common usage or the philosophical implications of this are massive. It would essentially mean that truth or falsity is an inherent property of the universe. Is this string gibberish or is it information? Might even change cryptography forever, too

[infogulch]

The reality of information is pretty well accepted. Take the black hole information paradox for example, which observes that 1. Hawking radiation means that black holes eventually evaporate, and 2. information about the infalling matter cannot be destroyed, so where does the information go after the black hole is evaporated? This study proposes a different way to test the reality of information that is a bit more... experimentally accessible than an event horizon.

[gfodor]

It's information in the Shannon sense of information entropy, which is about the rarity of sequences of bits, not the notion of bits themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)

[xaxaxb]

This is a point of view originating from physics to look at the world and combining with information theory. I think it's more likely the other way round: information/patterns dictate how particles are structured and their interactions. This goes for energy as well.

[badrabbit]

More like matter is an expression of information imo

[dekhn]

Information is matter that encodes meaningful data in a way that is resistant to loss from entropy. See also: reversible computing.

[adamrezich]

In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God.

[hprotagonist]

For something to exist, it has to be observed. For something to exist, it has to have a position in time and space. And this explains why nine-tenths of the mass of the universe is unaccounted for. Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it, and you cannot see the back of your own head. (except in very small universes). Nine-tenths of the universe, in fact, is the _paperwork_.

--Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

[lmarcos]

When studying physics (simple stuff like electromagnetism and gravitational forces) I always wondered how the universe "knows" what's the distance between two planets when it comes to calculating forces amongst them. If the data (the distance) actually exist, where is it stored? Is it perhaps calculated "on the fly" so it doesn't need to be "stored"?

Totally sure that's not how it works in real life, but for us humans, that model is the best theory we have so far, so it's difficult to think differently.

[disconcision]

interesting, this feels quite close to verlinde's entropic gravity theory, that "gravity is a consequence of the "information associated with the positions of material bodies" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity)