Portsmouth, Gatra.com- The visible cosmos may contain about 6 x 10^80 — or 600 million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion — bits of information, according to new estimates. This finding could have implications for the speculative possibility that the universe is actually a giant computer simulation. Live Science, 4/11.
Underlying the puzzling numbers are even more bizarre hypotheses. Six decades ago, German-American physicist Rolf Landauer proposed a kind of equivalence between information and energy, because erasing digital bits in computers generates a small amount of heat, which is a form of energy.
Because of Albert Einstein’s famous equation E = mc^2, which says that energy and matter are different forms of each other, Melvin Vopson, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth in England, previously suspected that there might be a relationship between information, energy and mass.
“Using the principle of mass-energy-information equivalence, I speculated that information could be the dominant form of matter in the universe,” he told Live Science. The information might even shed light on dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up most of the matter in the cosmos, he added.
Vopson set out to determine the amount of information in a single subatomic particle, such as a proton or a neutron. Such an entity can be fully described by three basic characteristics: its mass, charge, and spin, he said. “These properties make elementary particles distinguishable [dari] each other, and they can be considered as ‘information’,” he added.
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Information has a special definition that was first given by the American mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon in a groundbreaking 1948 paper entitled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” By looking at the maximum efficiency at which information can be transmitted, Shannon introduced the concept of bits. It can have a value of 0 or 1, and is used to measure units of information, such as distance measured in feet or meters or temperature measured in degrees, Vopson said.
Using Shannon’s equation, Vopson calculated that a proton or a neutron should contain the equivalent of 1,509 bits of encoded information. Vopson then derived an estimate of the total number of particles in the observable universe — about 10^80, which is in line with previous estimates — to determine the total information content of the cosmos. His findings appear Oct. 19 in the journal AIP Advances.
Even though the resulting amount is huge, it’s still not large enough to explain dark matter in the universe, Vopson said. In previous work, he estimated that about 10^93 bits of information — a number 10 trillion times larger than what he obtained — would be required to do so.
“The number I calculated was less than I expected,” he said, adding that he wasn’t sure why. It could be that important things are not taken into account in his calculations, which focus on particles like protons and neutrons but ignore entities like electrons, neutrinos, and quarks, because, according to Vopson, only protons and neutrons can store information about themselves.
He acknowledged that it was possible that the assumption was wrong and that perhaps other particles could also store information about themselves.
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This may be why the results are so different from previous calculations of the universe’s total information, which tends to be much higher, said Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at Yale University who was not involved in the research.
“This kind of ignores not elephants in space, but 10 billion elephants in space,” Laughlin told Live Science, referring to the many particles not considered in the new estimates.
While the calculations may not have direct application, they could be useful to those who speculate that the visible cosmos is, in fact, a giant computer simulation, Laughlin said. This so-called simulation hypothesis is “a very interesting idea,” he said.
“Calculating information content – basically the number of bits of memory required to run [alam semesta] – that’s interesting,” he added.
However, until now, the simulation hypothesis is still a mere hypothesis. “There’s no way of knowing if that’s true,” Laughlin said.
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