Where is the information stored?

[Heywood]

Imagine completely empty space. Now in that space place two electrons. Smash those electrons together hard enough and you get a shower of other particles....including protons. This suggests the information necessary to construct a proton is contained in the electron. Continue to smash particles together and conceivably you can have an entire universe....just like ours. Does the information necessary to construct a universe just like our exists in just two electrons? If it doesn't where does this information exist?

[robvalue]

I think you are already assuming the universe is being "run" by some external agent that needs to read information from the universe.

I don't think information, as you describe it, exists anywhere. It's just a method we use to describe what we observe.

There's no reason to think there's a third party "information reader" involved in any interaction.

[psychoslice]

I don't know, your telling the story.

[Alex K]

Imagine completely empty space. Now in that space place two electrons. Smash those electrons together hard enough and you get a shower of other particles....including protons. This suggests the information necessary to construct a proton is contained in the electron. Continue to smash particles together and conceivably you can have an entire universe....just like ours. Does the information necessary to construct a universe just like our exists in just two electrons? If it doesn't where does this information exist?

Good question. Our current description of fundamental physics via Quantum Field Theory has a very Platonesque flavor: there is a set of fields which serve as templates for the kinds of particles you can have, almost like a stencil.
Then there's a set of interaction rules for these fields. Even completely empty space has these rules underlying it. Even if there are no two electrons, the structure of the vacuum contains all possible particles and interactions in the form of virtual particles, governed by these rules.


When you let two electrons enter the game, you more or less give these virtual guys energy to become real particles. So I don't think it is entirely accurate to say that this information is "in the electrons".

[Heywood]

Imagine completely empty space. Now in that space place two electrons. Smash those electrons together hard enough and you get a shower of other particles....including protons. This suggests the information necessary to construct a proton is contained in the electron. Continue to smash particles together and conceivably you can have an entire universe....just like ours. Does the information necessary to construct a universe just like our exists in just two electrons? If it doesn't where does this information exist?

Good question. Our current description of fundamental physics via Quantum Field Theory has a very Platonesque flavor: there is a set of fields which serve as templates for the kinds of particles you can have, almost like a stencil.
Then there's a set of interaction rules for these fields. Even completely empty space has these rules underlying it. Even if there are no two electrons, the structure of the vacuum contains all possible particles and interactions in the form of virtual particles, governed by these rules.


When you let two electrons enter the game, you more or less give these virtual guys energy to become real particles. So I don't think it is entirely accurate to say that this information is "in the electrons".

So basically the information is encoded into the fields....correct?

[Alex K]

Hmmm... it's really hard to separate formalism from theory from reality here. I'm sure you could find a way to look at it where the information is encoded in the fields. In the so-called Heisenberg picture of quantum physics, all the dynamics of the universe is indeed encoded into the time evolution of the fields. You could also adopt the attitude that the formula in the picture is a sentence which contains all the information about dynamics and interactions. It could however be that we are merely discussing formalism here, and since all theories are provisional, one can wonder how closely this really resembles the actual structures in reality, if that is even a thing.

[robvalue]

Therefor Vishnu.

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Yeah, as alex knows way better than me, physics is incredibly complicated. To reduce it to very general and simple statements is a mistake.

[Alex K]

Therefor Vishnu.

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Yeah, as alex knows way better than me, physics is incredibly complicated. To reduce it to very general and simple statements is a mistake.

It's shocking enough that the above four lines describe almost all of physics. Tread lightly if you try to simplify it further.
It's a valid endeavour to try and derive philosophy from that (and fun), but looking at history, there have been many pitfalls in taking the theoretical status quo and drawing conclusions from that.

[robvalue]

For sure. Almost any time we try and make a calculation about reality, we are using vastly simplified models to do so. Ones we may not even currently be aware we are making. They often give us accurate-enough results for our purpose. But we should still remember that we have reduced an intricate work of art to stick men by doing so.

[Alex K]

Stick men indeed



Although to be fair, those are just a representation of a perturbation series.