Information

Reddit. From Michael Byrne via Motherboard at Slashdot: “, some 73 percent of posts on Reddit are voted on by users that haven’t actually clicked through to view the content being rated.” Brilliant futures await them as Wikipedia editors, provided they are living on food stamps in Mom’s basement. New media help us understand what old media did by not doing it. See also: ID and Wikipedia as the ultimate post-modern encyclopedia Is social media killing Wikipedia? and Wikipedians diminish another high achiever sympathetic to ID. Yes, there is sometimes useful information in Wikipedia. But one can say that of the supermarket tabloids as well. It’s a question of how likely that is, relative to stuff we can’t evaluate or should avoid, Read More ›

A reluctant physics student wrote to our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon for help recently. What, he asks, is this paper all about: — Journal of High Energy Physics May 2017, 2017:136 Supersymmetric many-body systems from partial symmetries — integrability, localization and scrambling Authors Pramod Padmanabhan, Soo-Jong Rey, Daniel Teixeira, Diego Trancanelli Email author Open AccessRegular Article – Theoretical Physics First Online: 25 May 2017 Abstract Partial symmetries are described by generalized group structures known as symmetric inverse semigroups. We use the algebras arising from these structures to realize supersymmetry in (0+1) dimensions and to build many-body quantum systems on a chain. This construction consists in associating appropriate supercharges to chain sites, in analogy to what is done in spin Read More ›

Philip Cunningham draws our attention to “New records set up with “Screws of Light””: In principle, twisted light can carry an arbitrary large amount of information per photon. This is in contrast to the polarization of light, which is limited to one bit per photon. For example, data rates of up to 100 terabits per second, which correspond to about 120 Blu-Ray discs per second, have already been achieved under laboratory conditions. The transmission under realistic conditions, however, is still in its infancy. In addition to transmission over short distances in special fiber optics, transmission of such light beams over free space, required for instance for satellite communication, was limited to three kilometers so far; achieved by the same Viennese Read More ›

From our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon: — a) Classical information is local. It is like beans in a bag, one, say, for each bushel of wheat. They are not connected to each other, each is independent of the other. b) Quantum information is non-local. It depends on the orientation of the other beans. It is like beads on an abacus, or digits “in the 100’s column” that count differently than digits “in the one’s column”. The information in (a) is calculated by combinations. The information in (b) is calculated with permutations. If I have 3 identical beans, then the number of combinations is 0, 1, 2, 3, so it represents 2 “bits” of base-2 information. But if the positions Read More ›

From Gregory Chaitin at UFRJ: In Chapter 8 of his 1996 Oxford University Press masterpiece The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers speculates on using information theory as the basis for a fundamental theory of consciousness. Building on his work, we attempt to flesh out an updated version of the Chalmers proposal by taking into account more recent developments including algorithmic information theory, quantum information theory, the holographic principle and the Bekenstein bound, and digital philosophy as sketched in two little-known monographs in Italian: Introduzione alla filosofia digitale and Bit Bang: La nascita della filosofia digitale … In the two decades since Chalmers published his panpsychism thesis that any physical system that processes information is conscious, it has become possible to put Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: We reported here the other day that distinguished German paleontologist Günter Bechly was erased by Wikipedia. The editors, claiming it had nothing to do with his having come out for intelligent design, explained that they decided he wasn’t “notable” enough. Now along comes another ID proponent, Walter Bradley of Baylor University. Dr. Bradley is of interest to us as a Fellow with the Center for Science & Culture and as co-author of a pioneering book that helped to set the course of the future ID movement, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories (1984). But apart from that, he also has an extremely impressive history of research, publishing, teaching, and related Read More ›

From Cell: A prevailing view among physiologists is that homeostasis evolves to protect organisms from damaging variation in physiological factors. Here, we propose that homeostasis also evolves to minimize noise in physiological channels. Fluctuations in physiological factors constitute inescapable noise that corrupts the transfer of information through physiological systems. We apply information theory to homeostasis to develop two related ideas. First, homeostatic regulation creates quiet physiological backgrounds for the transmission of all kinds of physiological information. Second, the performance of any homeostatic system influences information processing in other homeostatic systems. This dependence implies that multiple homeostatic systems, embedded within individual organisms, should show strongly nonadditive effects. Paper. (public access) – H. Arthur Woods, J. Keaton Wilson, An information hypothesis for Read More ›

From Mario Aguilera at U San Diego News: Intricate human physiological features such as the immune system require exquisite formation and timing to develop properly. Genetic elements must be activated at just the right moment, across vast distances of genomic space. “Promoter” areas, locations where genes begin to be expressed, must be paired precisely with “enhancer” clusters, where cells mature to a targeted function. Faraway promoters must be brought in proximity with their enhancer counterparts, but how do they come together? When these elements are not in sync, diseases such as leukemia and lymphoma can result. How does this work? Biologists at the University of California San Diego believe they have the answer. Calling it the “big bang” of immune Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost: The Dutch Origins Center, a virtual project, has been led by Nobel laureate Ben Feringa (2016, Chemistry)—-keynote speaker of this week’s two-day conference. The project is a Dutch national initiative involving 17 of the country’s universities and institutes. … Curiously, Steve Benner’s $5.4M Templeton-funded Origins project isn’t represented, but inorganic chemist Lee Cronin—-who’s developing a “Universal Life Detector” with big bucks from Templeton—- will address this week’s gathering. Cronin, based at the University of Glasgow, has been attempting to make matter come alive. One of most notable presenters at the event is astrobiologist Bob Hazen, who told me he is “very sympathetic to people who see echoes of biology in mineralogy”. Hazen explained his perspective Read More ›

Well, Columbia’s Rob Goodman thinks he did, at Aeon: Shannon’s ‘mathematical theory’ sets out two big ideas. The first is that information is probabilistic. We should begin by grasping that information is a measure of the uncertainty we overcome, Shannon said – which we might also call surprise. What determines this uncertainty is not just the size of the symbol vocabulary, as Nyquist and Hartley thought. It’s also about the odds that any given symbol will be chosen. Take the example of a coin-toss, the simplest thing Shannon could come up with as a ‘source’ of information. A fair coin carries two choices with equal odds; we could say that such a coin, or any ‘device with two stable positions’, Read More ›

From science writer Philip Perry at BigThink: If the nature of reality is in fact reducible to information itself, that implies a conscious mind on the receiving end, to interpret and comprehend it. Wheeler himself believed in a participatory universe, where consciousness holds a central role. Some scientists argue that the cosmos seems to have specific properties which allow it to create and sustain life. Perhaps what it desires most is an audience captivated in awe as it whirls in prodigious splendor. Modern physics has hit a wall in a number of areas. Some proponents of information theory believe embracing it may help us to say, sew up the rift between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Or perhaps it’ll aid Read More ›

From Ian O’Neill at LiveScience: Understanding the origin of life is arguably one of the most compelling quests for humanity. This quest has inevitably moved beyond the puzzle of life on Earth to whether there’s life elsewhere in the universe. Is life on Earth a fluke? Or is life as natural as the universal laws of physics? Jeremy England, a biophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to answer these profound questions. In 2013, he formulated a hypothesis that physics may spontaneously trigger chemicals to organize themselves in ways that seed “life-like” qualities. Now, new research by England and a colleague suggests that physics may naturally produce self-replicating chemical reactions, one of the first steps toward creating life Read More ›

From Sarah B. Puschmann at LiveScience: In 2014, one of Roy Caldwell’s octopuses went missing. Caldwell, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, had kept the reef octopuses (Abdopus aculeatus) he and his team collected on Lizard Island in Australia in separate, sealed tanks. Puzzled, he peered into the female octopus’s tank and found spermatophores, the capsules that contain octopus sperm, floating in the water. He looked closer and found the male there, too, buried in the gravel. The only way the male octopus could have made it into the female’s tank, Caldwell said, is for the male to have wriggled through the pipe that fed water into both octopuses’ tanks, an act some might deem Read More ›

Earlier today, we were looking at Sara Walker’s recent paper on origin of life and information (public access). Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts: Sarah Walker has worked in OOL research for almost a decade, getting her experience under Paul Davies at ASU. Davies is a theoretical physicist who also manages to write a pop-sci book every year. He has one or two on the OOL problem, and was a coauthor on at least one paper with NASA scientist Richard Hoover. All that to say that the mainstream media has for the most part ignored Davies and Walker’s contributions. When Davies was a co-author on the “arsenic shadow biosphere” paper, the Darwinistas attacked it with full throated Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: As a postscript to Brian Miller’s reply to MIT physicist Jeremy England, see this from the famed synthetic organic chemist James Tour, writing for the online journal Inference. In “An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Tour sets out this way: Life should not exist. This much we know from chemistry. In contrast to the ubiquity of life on earth, the lifelessness of other planets makes far better chemical sense. Synthetic chemists know what it takes to build just one molecular compound. The compound must be designed, the stereochemistry controlled. Yield optimization, purification, and characterization are needed. An elaborate supply is required to control synthesis from start to finish. None of this is Read More ›