Rob Sheldon on whether information can be the missing dark matter

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January 24, 2020

Cosmology, Information, Intelligent Design

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Further to the question, recently raised, as to whether information could be the long-sought missing dark matter, our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon, offers some thoughts:

The Long Ascent: Genesis 1–11 in Science & Myth, Volume 1 by [Sheldon, Robert]

Materialist thinkers may need to see information as material, whether that approach fits information or not

There is no evidence that information is dark matter or that consciousness is physical but materialists understandably long for evidence that would make their theory more viable.

There’s a couple of metaphysical assumptions going on here that keep this from working. That is, the physics isn’t so bad, it’s the metaphysics.

First: The dark matter problem is real?

I agree, and I think it can be explained by matter clumped in objects bigger than a pea but smaller than an asteroid. In this size range, astronomers cannot detect it with telescopes. The only issue is with an astrophysical model of the Big Bang that says if dark matter were “baryonic”, as in, made out of ordinary stuff–then ratios of Li/H are off etc. My claim is that the astrophysical model is incorrect, as many other people are now saying, so that it cannot rule out ordinary materials. We even have a candidate for this material–comets.

Second: Information has quantized energy?

I’m ambivalent. To begin with, Landauer’s estimate used entropy as the connection between information and energy, and there’s serious problems with equating different sorts of entropy, as our own Granville Sewell has pointed out. And even if we do quantize it, it seems to be attached to ordinary matter. Even the AIP paper cited in the article came up with 1000 proton mass difference in a full and empty Terabyte drive. Considering there are something like 10^24 atoms in the thing, we are never going to get 1:10^21 accuracy to measure this.

Third: Einstein said E=mc^2, so that energy must have a mass?

If it were true that information has energy, then perhaps it would have a mass. But we already have situations, such as gravitational potential energy, where we can’t locate the mass in a gravitationally bound system–like the Earth and Moon. So there are issues with trying to locate the mass associated with the energy.

Fourth: Finally, even supposing that we grant 2 & 3, the location of the mass has to be “outside” the galaxy in order to account for the dark matter attraction. How does information occupy empty space? Landauer would have said it couldn’t.

There’s just way too little to go on here.

Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon is also the author of Genesis: The Long Ascent and The Long Ascent, Volume II

Comments

The second major problem in his paper is that he claims that “Landauer said this proves information is more than just a mathematical quantity.” Yet, although Landauer indeed did say that ‘information is physical’, Landauer explicitly denied the independent physical reality of information. In fact Landauer said that Roger Penrose's contention that information has an existence independent of matter and energy was a quote unquote 'quaint notion'.
Information is a Physical Entity - Rolf Landauer Excerpt: Information is inevitably inscribed in a physical medium. It is not an abstract entity. It can be denoted by a hole in a punched card, by the orientation of a nuclear spin, or by the pulses transmitted by a neuron. The quaint notion that information has an existence independent of its physical manifestation is still seriously advocated [6],,, [6] R. Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.192.2928&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Moreover, despite Landauer deriding Penrose’s ‘quaint notion’, Landauer’s contention that information cannot exist independently of its physical representation has also now been falsified by advances in quantum information theory. In the following 2011 paper, researchers ,,, show that when the bits (in a computer) to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer's state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,, In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that (in quantum information theory) an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object's entropy is always dependent on the observer.
Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy - June 1, 2011 Excerpt: Recent research by a team of physicists,,, describe,,, how the deletion of data, under certain conditions, can create a cooling effect instead of generating heat. The cooling effect appears when the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement is invoked.,,, The new study revisits Landauer's principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. When the memory content is known, it should be possible to delete the bits in such a manner that it is theoretically possible to re-create them. It has previously been shown that such reversible deletion would generate no heat. In the new paper, the researchers go a step further. They show that when the bits to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer's state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,, In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object's entropy is always dependent on the observer. Applied to the example of deleting data, this means that if two individuals delete data in a memory and one has more knowledge of this data, she perceives the memory to have lower entropy and can then delete the memory using less energy.,,, No heat, even a cooling effect; In the case of perfect classical knowledge of a computer memory (zero entropy), deletion of the data requires in theory no energy at all. The researchers prove that "more than complete knowledge" from quantum entanglement with the memory (negative entropy) leads to deletion of the data being accompanied by removal of heat from the computer and its release as usable energy. This is the physical meaning of negative entropy. Renner emphasizes, however, "This doesn't mean that we can develop a perpetual motion machine." The data can only be deleted once, so there is no possibility to continue to generate energy. The process also destroys the entanglement, and it would take an input of energy to reset the system to its starting state. The equations are consistent with what's known as the second law of thermodynamics: the idea that the entropy of the universe can never decrease. Vedral says "We're working on the edge of the second law. If you go any further, you will break it." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.htm
in regards to the preceding article, in the following article Dr. Vaccaro states that “Landauer said that information is physical because it takes energy to erase it. We are saying that the reason it (information) is physical has a broader context than that.”,
Scientists show how to erase information without using energy – January 2011 Excerpt: Until now, scientists have thought that the process of erasing information requires energy. But a new study shows that, theoretically, information can be erased without using any energy at all.,,, “Landauer said that information is physical because it takes energy to erase it. We are saying that the reason it (information) is physical has a broader context than that.”, Vaccaro explained. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-scientists-erase-energy.html
Moreover, in 2010 the Maxwell’s demon thought experiment, which was originally devised by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867, was finally experimentally realized. As the following paper highlights, it has now been experimentally demonstrated that knowledge of a particle's location and/or position converts information into energy.
Maxwell's demon demonstration turns information into energy - November 2010 Excerpt: Scientists in Japan are the first to have succeeded in converting information into free energy in an experiment that verifies the "Maxwell demon" thought experiment devised in 1867.,,, In Maxwell’s thought experiment the demon creates a temperature difference simply from information about the gas molecule temperatures and without transferring any energy directly to them.,,, Until now, demonstrating the conversion of information to energy has been elusive, but University of Tokyo physicist Masaki Sano and colleagues have succeeded in demonstrating it in a nano-scale experiment. In a paper published in Nature Physics they describe how they coaxed a Brownian particle to travel upwards on a "spiral-staircase-like" potential energy created by an electric field solely on the basis of information on its location. As the particle traveled up the staircase it gained energy from moving to an area of higher potential, and the team was able to measure precisely how much energy had been converted from information. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-maxwell-demon-energy.html
And as the following 2010 article stated about the preceding experiment, "This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,"
Demonic device converts information to energy - 2010 Excerpt: "This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content," says Christopher Jarzynski, a statistical chemist at the University of Maryland in College Park. In 1997, Jarzynski formulated an equation to define the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit of information2; the work by Sano and his team has now confirmed this equation. "This tells us something new about how the laws of thermodynamics work on the microscopic scale," says Jarzynski. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=demonic-device-converts-inform
And as the following 2017 article states: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,, quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,, Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution – May 2017 Excerpt: the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it, “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.” In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply. They’ve found new, quantum versions of the laws that scale up to the originals. Rewriting the theory from the bottom up has led experts to recast its basic concepts in terms of its subjective nature, and to unravel the deep and often surprising relationship between energy and information — the abstract 1s and 0s by which physical states are distinguished and knowledge is measured.,,, Renato Renner, a professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, described this as a radical shift in perspective. Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,, https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-thermodynamics-revolution/
Again to repeat that last sentence,“Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,, That statement about entropy being a property of an observer who describes the system, for anyone involved in the ID vs. Darwinism debate, ought to send chills down their scientific spine.
January 2020 - In other words, Intelligent Design, and a direct inference to God as the Intelligence behind life, (via the non-locality of quantum information and/or the non-locality of quantum entanglement ), has, for all intents and purposes, finally achieved experimental confirmation. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/karsten-pultz-why-random-processes-cannot-produce-information-a-new-argument/#comment-690519
Simply put, these developments in quantum information theory go to the very heart of the ID vs. Evolution debate and directly falsify, number one, Darwinian claims that immaterial information is merely ’emergent’ from some material basis. And number two, these experimental realizations of the Maxwell’s demon thought experiment go even further and also directly validates a primary claim from ID proponents that an Intelligent Designer who imparts information into a biological system is necessary in order to circumvent the second law. In other words, the last decade or so of experimental research in quantum information theory has been VERY GOOD to the presuppositions of Intelligent Deign proponents Verse:
John 1:1-4 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.
bornagain77_{January 26, 2020
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As to this claim
There is no dark matter. Instead, information has mass, physicist says Vopson takes this notion one step further. He says that not only is information the essential unit of the universe but also that it is energy and has mass. To support this claim, he unifies and coordinates special relativity with the Landauer Principle. The latter is named after Rolf Landauer. In 1961, he predicted that erasing even one bit of information would release a tiny amount of heat, a figure which he calculated. Landauer said this proves information is more than just a mathematical quantity. This connects information to energy. Through experimental testing over the years, the Landauer Principle has held up. Vopson says, "He [Landauer] first identified the link between thermodynamics and information by postulating that logical irreversibility of a computational process implies physical irreversibility." This indicates that information is physical, Vopson says, and demonstrates the link between information theory and thermodynamics. In Vopson's theory, information, once created has "finite and quantifiable mass." It so far applies only to digital systems, but could very well apply to analogue and biological ones too, and even quantum or relativistic-moving systems. "Relativity and quantum mechanics are possible future directions of the mass-energy-information equivalence principle," he says. In the paper published in the journal AIP Advances, Vopson outlines the mathematical basis for his hypothesis. "I am the first to propose the mechanism and the physics by which information acquires mass," he said, "as well as to formulate this powerful principle and to propose a possible experiment to test it." The fifth state of matter To measure the mass of digital information, you start with an empty data storage device. Next, you measure its total mass with a highly sensitive measuring apparatus. Then, you fill it and determine its mass. Next, you erase one file and evaluate it again. The trouble is, the "ultra-accurate mass measurement" device the paper describes doesn't exist yet. https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/dark-matter-theory? and this claim: The mass-energy-information equivalence principle ABSTRACT Landauer’s principle formulated in 1961 states that logical irreversibility implies physical irreversibility and demonstrated that information is physical. Here we formulate a new principle of mass-energy-information equivalence proposing that a bit of information is not just physical, as already demonstrated, but it has a finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information. In this framework, it is shown that the mass of a bit of information at room temperature (300K) is 3.19 × 10-38 Kg. To test the hypothesis we propose here an experiment, predicting that the mass of a data storage device would increase by a small amount when is full of digital information relative to its mass in erased state. For 1Tb device the estimated mass change is 2.5 × 10-25 Kg. https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794
There are a couple of major problems in this article and paper. First off, I can save him a lot of time and trouble in his effort to try and prove that information has mass, and prove that information does not have mass, by simply referencing quantum teleportation:
Ions have been teleported successfully for the first time by two independent research groups Excerpt: In fact, copying isn’t quite the right word for it. In order to reproduce the quantum state of one atom in a second atom, the original has to be destroyed. This is unavoidable – it is enforced by the laws of quantum mechanics, which stipulate that you can’t ‘clone’ a quantum state. In principle, however, the ‘copy’ can be indistinguishable from the original,,, http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2004/October/beammeup.asp Atom takes a quantum leap – 2009 Excerpt: Ytterbium ions have been ‘teleported’ over a distance of a metre.,,, “What you’re moving is information, not the actual atoms,” says Chris Monroe, from the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland in College Park and an author of the paper. But as two particles of the same type differ only in their quantum states, the transfer of quantum information is equivalent to moving the first particle to the location of the second. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2171769/posts Quantum Teleportation Enters the Real World – September 19, 2016 Excerpt: Two separate teams of scientists have taken quantum teleportation from the lab into the real world. Researchers working in Calgary, Canada and Hefei, China, used existing fiber optics networks to transmit small units of information across cities via quantum entanglement — Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.”,,, This isn’t teleportation in the “Star Trek” sense — the photons aren’t disappearing from one place and appearing in another. Instead, it’s the information that’s being teleported through quantum entanglement.,,, ,,, it is only the information that gets teleported from one place to another. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/09/19/quantum-teleportation-enters-real-world/#.V-HqWNEoDtR
In other words, information does not have mass but information is what is defining the atom to have mass. Even quantum field theory states that mass is not an intrinsic property of matter but that mass is acquired via interaction with the Higg's field:
39:00 minute mark: “Mass turns out not to be an intrinsic property of matter either” (mass is a phenomenological artifact of field interactions, i.e. specifically ‘otherwise massless particles’ interacting with the Higg’s field) – Bruce Gordon: – The Incompatibility of Physicalism with Physics: A Conversation with Dr. Bruce Gordon https://youtu.be/wk-UO81HmO4?t=2344 Focus: Nobel Prize—Why Particles Have Mass - October 11, 2013 Excerpt: Subsequent work showed that the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism (or “Higgs mechanism,” for short) could give mass not only to weak particles, but also to electrons, quarks, and other fundamental particles. The more strongly a particle interacts with the Higgs field, the more massive it is. https://physics.aps.org/articles/v6/111
In other words, mass is not even a fundamental property of the particles themselves but is an 'emergent property' of the particles via their interaction with the Higg's field: Moreover, as if that was not bad enough for his theory, via John Wheeler, we now know that information is even more fundamental than fields themselves are, and is thus more fundamental than the Higg’s field itself which, according to quantum field theory, is what is giving particles their mass.
John Wheeler (1911–2008) summarizes his life in physics - February 2014 Excerpt: "I think of my lifetime in physics as divided into three periods. In the first period, extending from the beginning of my career until the early 1950?s, I was in the grip of the idea that Everything Is Particles. I was looking for ways to build all basic entities – neutrons, protons, mesons, and so on – out of the lightest, most fundamental particles, electrons, and photons. I call my second period Everything Is Fields. From the time I fell in love with general relativity and gravitation in 1952 until late in my career, I pursued the vision of a world made of fields, one in which the apparent particles are really manifestations of electric and magnetic fields, gravitational fields, and space-time itself. Now I am in the grip of a new vision, that Everything Is Information. The more I have pondered the mystery of the quantum and our strange ability to comprehend this world in which we live, the more I see possible fundamental roles for logic and information as the bedrock of physical theory." – J. A. Wheeler, K. Ford, Geons, Black Hole, & Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics New York W.W. Norton & Co, 1998, pp 63-64.
bornagain77_{January 26, 2020
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no need for the dark fudge factor required for the current consensus to have a chance of being valid, based on the strongest science, which is both ID and YeC, where all the empirical observations fully align w/ normal matter and basic science as explained in by SPIRAL cosmological redshift hypothesis and model, that as son as studied and fairly considered should be established as the new standard. here is how the two options compare on some key issues: https://www.academia.edu/36013854/SPIRAL_vs_SCM_cosmological_modelsPearlman_{January 25, 2020
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Third: Einstein said E=mc^2, so that energy must have a mass?
No, it means that matter and energy are interchangeable.ET_{January 25, 2020
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What do they mean by “dark matter”? What does that 2-word term refer to?pw_{January 25, 2020
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Information being defined as what exactly, in this context?Seversky_{January 24, 2020
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