In still another post at PT (go here), I’m charged with committing a basic physics error in my book No Free Lunch, much to the delight of the gallery that comments there (based, by the way, on a deliberate misquote — see below). Too bad that Freeman Dyson agrees with me and not with them. Here, then, is the pearl: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.txt. Go trample on it. And having trampled on it, go email Freeman and get him to distance himself from my views even though the section of NFL cited merely expands on his and Frank Tipler’s ideas.
The light from the distant galaxies will be strongly red-shifted. But the sky will never become empty and dark, if we can tune our eyes to longer and longer wavelengths as time goes on. –Freeman Dyson
In addition, the author of the PT post deliberately misquotes me, juxtaposing two passages from my work without any indication that several pages of text intervene between the passages. Here is the passage attributed to me at PT exactly as it appeared there (at the very least, there should have been an ellipsis before “Certainly quantum mechanics …” as well as an indication that his actually is not the start of a sentence):
What’s more, the energy in quantum events is proportional to frequency or inversely proportional to wavelength. And since there is no upper limit to the wavelength of, for instance, electromagnetic radiation, there is no lower limit to the energy required to impart information. In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all. Whether the designer works through quantum mechanical effects is not ultimately the issue here. Certainly quantum mechanics is much more hospitable to an information processing view of the universe than the older mechanical models. All that’s needed, however, is a universe whose constitution and dynamics are not reducible to deterministic natural laws. Such a universe will produce random events and thus have the possibility of producing events that exhibit specified complexity (i.e., events that stand out against the backdrop of randomness).
And now here is the full text with the two passages marked in bold. Note that the PT post simply kludges those passages together (you’ll have to scroll down quite a ways to see the connection). By the way, I’ve saved the page at PT just so that they don’t insert ellipses and say there never was a problem:
How much energy is required to impart information? We have sensors that can detect quantum events and amplify them to the macroscopic level. What’s more, the energy in quantum events is proportional to frequency or inversely proportional to wavelength. And since there is no upper limit to the wavelength of, for instance, electromagnetic radiation, there is no lower limit to the energy required to impart information. In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all.
Limits, however, are tricky things. To be sure, an embodied designer could impart information by employing arbitrarily small amounts of energy. But an arbitrarily small amount of energy is still a positive amount of energy, and any designer employing positive amounts of energy to impart information is still, in Paul Davies’s phrase, “moving the particles.†[[In contrast to the PT post, the possibility of infinite wavelength, zero energy, and zero bandwidth therefore never arises. –WmAD]]. The question remains how can an unembodied designer influence the natural world without imparting any energy whatsoever. It is here that an indeterministic universe comes to the rescue. Although we can thank quantum mechanics for the widespread recognition that the universe is indeterministic, indeterminism has a long philosophical history, and appears in such diverse places as the atomism of Lucretius and the pragmatism of Charles Peirce and William James. Read More ›