Letters to the Editor
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Had to Stop Reading
I had to stop reading at this point. " Why venture into such challenging territory? . . . Because before blithely writing off scientists as rigid and uncreative you should get a glimpse of how the other half thinks." Any nitwit who thinks or has ever thought that scientists are uncreative or particularly left-brained shouldn't be writing for Salon or any other serious publication. That Ms. Miller seems to feel that being interested in the cosmos needs a justification is truly puzzling.
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Cosmos not so simple
Several quick things: information is not like energy or mass any more than meaning is ink. Change the scale on your thermometer -- now, where's the difference in E? Also, his definition of entropy is simply wrong. Entropy is measure of available E for work. Before you can understand S=k*lnW you need to understand equipartition, etc. But even Dirac Prize winners make mistakes about entropy. The whole subject is very technical and easy to misunderstand,and you have to be very careful when applying probabilty & canonical ensembles to anything larger than molecules. Finally, the universe is not dying a heat death.
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metaphysics and physics
Delving into the more bizzare elements of physics and quantum mechanics brings up, at least to me, questions of spirituality. Having avidly read most of the popular literature on physics for the last two decades I have begun to speculate on where this new information will take us, if we survive. Some of the ideas that the universe is based on information have profound implications for everything from teleportation to time travel. To explore this I have started a blog of an encounter with an advanced civilization, explaining how understanding and manipulating the information can provide a stepping stone to the future. If you are interested you can find these ruminations on the blogspot website under 'probdrive'.
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Heat Death
Mr. Meyers,
"the universe is not dying a heat death"
Really? What's happening then? Current consensus is that it will.
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Not necessarily true
It does not make much sense imo to discuss whether the temperature of the syrup is transmitted through the thermometer . . . no, through its mercury . . . no, from the light rays that bounce from the thermometer to your eyes; there is no one right answer.
Laura Miller mentions numerous points from the book as though they were Truth.
The reality is that that many points are controversial among physicists. There are several differing interpretations of the Schrodinger's Cat paradox. Many physicists believe that when energy turn to heat, it most definitely *does* lose its information. Many physicists are considering the possibility that order can arise from chaos (like galaxy formation from dust, or evolution of life from the primeval ooze). The heat death of the universe is by no means universally believed to be inevitable.
I also found it offensive that Ms. Miller felt the need to say, in esssence, that scientists are not necessarily unfeeling jerks. The problem is the condescension that without her having put in a good word for scientists, the default would be to assume the stereotype.
(I suspect her heart was in the right place, but it came out all wrong.)
One more thing: The idea that the universe is a giant computer is in no way original with the book author, but as old as the hills, being detectable even in the 18th-century writings of Leibniz. It is nowadays mostly obvious, as well, that the universe figures out in real time things like the exact orbit of the moon or how water splashes on the floor, things that our computers could *never* figure out exactly, and would take eons to determine the answer to a high enough accuracy.
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You got your leg pulled
I'm pretty sure the "Counterfactual computing" link in the article is a joke.
One pretty big tipoff is the following line:
"We also showed theoretically how to obtain the answer without ever running the algorithm, by using a 'chained Zeno' effect."
Zeno is the villian in Scientology, kind of like the devil of Christianity.
Plus, read it with an eye to its being fake, and it's pretty humorous.
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Truth
I too was disappointed, although not surprised at all, that Ms. Miller quotes from the book as if it is revealed truth. There seems to be a real trend in "popular science" writing (and to be fair some of this comes from real scientists, like Brian Green) where this happens. One example is the whole decoherence thing, which is very controversial in the physics community, see for example http://www.citebase.org/cgi-bin/fulltext?format=application/pdf&identifier=oai:arXiv.org:quant-ph/0112095, from Stephen Adler at the Institute for Advanced Study. A book in which decoherence is cited as explaining away the problems with Schrodinger's cat is not a book I would trust very far. A much better book is Penrose's Road to Reality, though to be fair even for a mathematician like myself it can be heavy slogging in parts, but even if you were to skip most of the math, you would still get a very good sense of the issues in modern physics. Penrose, who knows a *lot*, is very clear that there is a lot he doesn't know, and is very good at explaining why the people who claim they *do* know are going too far.
Jeff McGowan
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Reminds me of a quote from John Perry Barlow
There's a great story from John Perry Barlow (co-founder of the EFF and former Greatful Dead songwriter) in an issue of Wired from 1994 called "The Economy of Ideas". (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas_pr.html) The article is amazing for confronting the large number of issues surrounding information and intellectual property. And this was years ahead of the mp3 fight or p2p or bittorrent. I highly recommend the article for people interested in that sort of thing.
There's one part in the article where he's describing the attributes of information, and it struck me that his description is relevant to this discussion.
II. INFORMATION IS A LIFE FORM
"Stewart Brand is generally credited with this elegant statement of the obvious, which recognizes both the natural desire of secrets to be told and the fact that they might be capable of possessing something like a "desire" in the first place.
"English biologist and philosopher Richard Dawkins proposed the idea of "memes," self-replicating patterns of information that propagate themselves across the ecologies of mind, a pattern of reproduction much like that of life forms.
"I believe they are life forms in every respect but their freedom from the carbon atom. They self-reproduce, they interact with their surroundings and adapt to them, they mutate, they persist. They evolve to fill the empty niches of their local environments, which are, in this case the surrounding belief systems and cultures of their hosts, namely, us.
"Indeed, sociobiologists like Dawkins make a plausible case that carbon-based life forms are information as well, that, as the chicken is an egg's way of making another egg, the entire biological spectacle is just the DNA molecule's means of copying out more information strings exactly like itself."