Submitted by newsphilosophy t3_yxpgwk in space
Comments
Chimalez t1_iwptvpo wrote
From what I can gather, since dark matter seems to literally just be unobservable mass, it may make sense for it to be information since information bits have no charge or spin, therefore they can't really interact with much in the physical world and would just appear as a point of mass/energy- much the same way we think dark matter does.
drLagrangian t1_iwq1342 wrote
I think the idea that information has energy comes from calculations involving the entropy of the medium the information is in when the information is there vs when it's not. So a hard drive filled with information would have a mass of M+I, while the hard drive that has been erased would have mass of M.
Am I right?
So it would be subservient to the energy/mass of the medium.
Unless anyone theorized about information existing without a medium... What would that even look like. How would it get there? How would it get out?
Could an advanced tech let you encode your porn onto space itself?
RightHandedAndEvil t1_iwqe8os wrote
But a hard drive that's erased had the same amount of information in it that a "full" one has - it's just information that's not readable/useful to us.
RacerX00 t1_iwqqzka wrote
I mean, not readable/useful is objectively false if we can observe its interaction with galaxies and discern its properties as a result. It's both readable in a sense and useful in explaining the natural world.
That's a representation of the information, just not at the resolution that you find satisfying. Just like a JPEG isn't a direct copy of every pixel and you get a full sense of the picture despite the blending of pixels underneath compared to an uncompressed image, the same is true of dark matter.
JPEGs do a much better job of painting a picture, sure, but dark matters effects on the natural world is still a picture.
RightHandedAndEvil t1_iwqvbq5 wrote
Yes agreed. Was just pushing back against the idea that a "full" hard drive had more information in it than an "empty" one, where full and empty are more about human perception. The actual information content is the same (as you point out).
salbris t1_iwry2dx wrote
I feel like this is a very poetic interpretation of reality but not really accurate. Information isn't really anything but a specific pattern of other things. A thought in our brain isn't a collection of spinless particles it's just the patter of our neurons and their chemical and electrical signals. Same as a JPEG on a harddrive. It's just a collection of electrical (magnetic?) charges in a particular pattern.
ComradeAllison t1_iwssemx wrote
Actually, the term information is a bit misleading, as it carries different meanings to different people. The information being used in this sense is a physical, measurable thing which ties very closely with entropy and even has conservation laws associated with it.
rucksackmac t1_iwsxayq wrote
Oof. Now we're tiptoeing into an ontological realm of the mind-body question, the hard problem, and other philosophical conundrums.
Careful with that word "just". How exactly is that thought "just" anything? What are the coordinates of these neurons, which synapses fire each time when I think "blue." Is it different than the word? Or the color? Or the idea of the color? What is the thing that it feels like to be?
Comparing our brain to a jpeg on a hard drive is far from accurate, and not very poetic either I might add. :P
salbris t1_iwt5yv5 wrote
I don't need to know the exact coordinates of every air molecule to know the wind is blowing and that it's an emergent property of the weather and the microscopic forces of temperature and the movement of atoms. The brain is no more magical. We don't yet understand the patterns and and systems of the mind but they are basically as simple as some data stored on a harddrive. The only major difference is the process by which memory is constructed. It's not likely to be a singular thing like a file on a computer is.
House13Games t1_iwtoz81 wrote
Since we dont actually know how it works, saying its basically as simple as some data stored on a hard drive is rather speculative.
Some theories suggest that the operation of neurons depends on quantum effects. And quantum stuff is influenced by the observer, so it potentially could get a bit tangled. Personally I think these tangled systems are most interesting, and that by reducing the brain to a classical computer type device, we miss the more interesting possibilities for how consciousness and awareness (information) might be some fundamental aspect of reality rather than an emergent property of it. Eastern mysticism has for a long time said that consciousness and an external reality arise simultaneously, and are intrinsically linked. To me at least, it seems western science is only starting to describe the same thing, albeit from the reality side of this duality, where eastern thought took it from the consciousness side. But both suggest that both sides are somehow intertwined and co-dependent.
For example, the idea of consciousness being the thing which divides a cosmic oneness into dichotomies (true/false, this/that, real/unreal, etc) is strikingly similar to quantum probabilities being collapsed by the actions of an observer. So striking in fact that I find it hard to believe it's not the same underlying thing simply being described in multiple ways.
rucksackmac t1_ixcii2r wrote
I said nothing of magic, friend. Why would you hand wave away great fields of thought and discovery as "magic?" That doesn't sound very sciencey!
The "computer" metaphor, so to speak, has been long outdated, and widely understood by neuroscientists as a pointless comparison.
If you're open to some light reading, these are pretty good eli15 places to start.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomp.2022.810358/full
https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer
https://www.infoq.com/articles/brain-not-computer/
Calling our brain a computer is "just" a cliche that people have come to purport as hard truth and fact because the brain is so difficult to understand, while transistors sending signals in a CPU is not.
It's easier to tie it up in a neat bow and say "oh there it is. Done." But I don't see any Bladerunner level robots running around, and there's good reason for it. If we ever hope to achieve such a feat, we have to accept that the brain is still an incredible mystery, and our colloquial comparisons to my laptop or even some kind of marketing AI or digital art ai is simply not comparable by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm just some Redditor, read up on the matter because if you're open to expanding your understanding I actually think you'll find it quite interesting. Personally it only makes me further curious about what AI could look like 1000 years from now and what we might need to get there.
themonkeymoo t1_iwssp8m wrote
It doesn't, though. At least, it doesn't for entropic and quantum definitions of "information", which are the only ones that matter in this context.
House13Games t1_iwto1iw wrote
Not really. It has the same amount of bits, but different organizations of bits have more or less informational entropy. You can randomize the bits, for very low amount of information. You can set them all to 0, which is more ordered, and so contains more information than the random sequence. Or you can have files and folders, which contains a gigantic amount more structure and patterns of information, on many different levels. This concept is important in cryptography for example, where you can take a random looking string of letters, and calculate the entropy of it, to determine whether it contains less or more information, ie, work out if it is actually a random sequence, or if it is a coherent message in a natural language like english, even if you cant yet work out what the message actually is.
Twoducktuesdays t1_iwq1l6a wrote
But are m and i different things? Isn’t m+i simply m with changes.
drLagrangian t1_iwq745u wrote
The mass information theory says that information itself has energy, which means it also has mass. So those changes imply the mass of the information.
But I don't know if the mass of the information can exist on its own or if it needs another mass to act on. Sort of like how an electron in a higher orbital has more mass than a lower energy electron because it has more energy in it. But that energy associated with the excited electron can't exist on its own unless it is emitted as a photon... Where it becomes a different form of energy.
Chimalez t1_iwq4h91 wrote
Yeah he specified he meant the mass would be "m + i" implying "m" is the mass of the unfilled hard drive's mass and "i" is the information mass, added together you get m-total.
AdSpecialist4523 t1_iwrfg6p wrote
Isn't an "unfilled" hard drive just a hard drive filled with data that doesn't translate to anything usable? Like all 1s or all 0s? Or simply deleting the record that says there's data on it. Adding mass to a battery by charging it makes sense, but I'm having a hard time with the concept of an unfilled hard drive being a thing that can exist.
Chimalez t1_iwq57vy wrote
I think you're absolutely right. It's an interesting thing to think about, where information may actually be relegated to how much energy space itself contains. Maybe it implies the "dark matter" regions are areas where space contains massive amounts of energy which allows "information" to exist there. The "information" we see in dark matter could just be a product of some huge cosmic energy system.
drLagrangian t1_iwq8f1z wrote
I started a thought in another reply. But the question is, can the information exist on its own? Because in the universe we understand, the hard drive has mass, then you add energy to it to record information on it, so that information now has energy associated with it and therefore mass, and you transformed the energy you had into information.
I started an analogy saying that it was like an electron. Add energy to it and it gets excited and has more mass, but that extra mass can't exist that way without the electron - or at least, the mass of the higher energy state can't exist without the electron.
but the electron can emit the energy in the form of a photon, which carries electromagnetic energy. So the question is: can an information carrying object emit the energy of the information in a way that preserves the information? There by producing a "dark energy, informationish particle". Or, can the information carrying object only release the information energy in a way that destroys the information or combines it with something else, like by radiating the information out encoded as light, or dispersing into heat?
Chimalez t1_iwqb7y7 wrote
I actually have a very limited knowledge of photons other than the curious infinitely small mass associated with them, but I'd assume that even infinity can contain information and since photons have a distinct electromagnetic structure, it stands to reason that information can indeed be encoded successfully as long as the medium actually has some form of mass. Can't wait to go to grad school for something very similar to this so I can explain it in detail c:
RedditMods_R_Nazis t1_iwrdgj9 wrote
It’s the OS of the simulation running in the background.
Fallacy_Spotted t1_iwsf7zm wrote
Information is encoded in the entropy of the system. All 0s and all 1s is the same and gives no usable information. Time is also encoded in entropy. It is our perception of movement along an energy gradient. Information is a point on the line of time and the substance of that line is entropy.
RnDanger t1_iwpybdk wrote
A theory that can't be tested isn't useful. It doesn't mean it's wrong but it offers no insight if we can't test it. Until we find a way to measure "information" experimentally, this isn't really science. It's speculation.
xMrBojangles t1_iwq7cqb wrote
This comes off as a couple grad students smoking a joint and letting their minds wander.
"Dude, what if dark matter is just information?"
"Duuuude"
Stay-At-Home-Jedi t1_iwrc8zq wrote
"Dude, what if dark matter is just all the information that doesn't matter?"
"Duuuuuuude"
lagavulinski t1_iwqoh82 wrote
I'm sure the speculative idea of the atom was useful long before we could test/prove its validity or existence. Creating frameworks for understanding the world around us is useful, whether right or wrong.
Chimalez t1_iwq0uc5 wrote
Of course. But how cool would it be to experimentally prove one day? ;)
rpsls t1_iwr0qh8 wrote
I remember reading that they had found galaxies which had collided and the bigger one stripped the smaller galaxy of its dark matter. That these small post-collision galaxies were spinning more like what would be expected with standard physics. Did that not pan out, and if it did, how would a galaxy stripping another of “information” even work?
ryschwith t1_iwrmape wrote
That’s still the case (the Bullet Cluster is frequently brought up here) and is generally where every “what if dark matter isn’t matter” theory falls apart. I don’t really understand this particular theory enough to say whether or not it resolves this.
Chimalez t1_iwr5jdo wrote
If you assume that based on the laws of conservation of mass and energy, information cannot decay into a nonexistent state, then if the dark matter of one galaxy collided with the dark matter of another galaxy, the one with more dark matter (aka more "information" in this example) would be subject to less overall decay due to having more energy available during the collision, or perhaps would even absorb the structure of the lower-entropy dark matter. I realise I brought up entropy here and it may not seem relevant but if information is really structured in the universe then maybe entropy is what dictates the interactions like what you described above.
runaway-thread t1_iwroyc9 wrote
At the core of science is cartesian skepticism, so let me just say that this "information as a 5th state of matter' is tingling my cartesian skepticism organ.
"What is this thing with no charge or spin? Oh that's 'information'. Maybe it's a toll free number. Maybe it's a cat GIF. Maybe it's Maybelline. All we know right now is that it's information'.
Sure, anything with a property is information. A red balloon is information too. I don't know, I guess I need someone on the Internet to tell me how wrong I am.
WackyBones510 t1_iwqv9ex wrote
Information as in something created by intelligence or could it be naturally occurring information? I guess for this purpose idk what “information” means.
Chimalez t1_iwr4izd wrote
Information as in, a structure (either physical, electromagnetic, or otherwise) that contains a recognizable pattern that can be used to discern data contained within. For example, a molecule emitting a specific electromagnetic frequency, at a specific strength, in conjunction with millions of other molecules, to form an idea.
That's the best description I can think of.
QVRedit t1_iwsgoic wrote
Consider a single electron — it has mass and charge and spin and location-ish, and momentum-ish. (Here ‘ish’ meaning that’s somewhat fuzzy)
An electron requires multiple bits of information to describe it.
Although in some senses all electrons are identical.
[deleted] t1_iwr5xjg wrote
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[deleted] t1_iwraa5i wrote
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orbital_one t1_iwqf6fm wrote
But wouldn't that mean that information can't travel at the speed of light?
Stay-At-Home-Jedi t1_iwrden0 wrote
what part wouldn't mean they can't travel the speed of light?
light is a massless photon but that doesn't hinder it.
orbital_one t1_iwrnhn9 wrote
Dark matter must have mass and would have to be traveling at subluminal speeds within galaxies. It's not possible to accelerate massive objects to light speed. So if dark matter is actually information in physical form then that should imply that information (or at least some types of information?) doesn't travel at light speed. Unless I'm mistaken about something.
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QVRedit t1_iwsh277 wrote
And photons contain multiple bits of information.
QVRedit t1_iwsgxki wrote
If it was ‘very light’, as in had very little mass, then it could travel at almost the speed of light. It’s kind of weird though.
just_thisGuy t1_iwrg8kv wrote
Just like mass can be converted to energy it’s not a huge leap to think it might be convertible into information, might be an interesting clue that we might be in a simulation.
QVRedit t1_iwsew0v wrote
All the properties of matter require an information state to store their values.
Something as complex as a proton must take multiple bits of information to describe it.
How many ? 20 ? 30 ? More ?
just_thisGuy t1_iwskcuq wrote
Protons are made from quarks, but even quarks probably need a huge number of bits to be represented, maybe even more bits per quark than there are quarks in the universe, wolfram has in interesting information theory on that, where even space is just array of numbers.
QVRedit t1_iwton9g wrote
Why so many bits per quark - I don’t understand / can’t conceptualise that..
Can you offer any explanation ?
just_thisGuy t1_iwuzz7d wrote
I don’t know if I’m smart enough to explain or at least I have not spent the time enough to understand it exactly, but basically he has an idea that space (and all the stuff inside it) can be explained by a massive number of hyper graphs and their relationships. Here is a link: https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/potential-relation-to-physics/the-structure-of-space/#p-410 So if I understand it correctly everything in the universe including space are just nodes and relationships between nodes, and there are simple rules that govern them, I don’t think they know what the rules are yet, actually there is an idea that it does not matter that the rules are as long as they are consistent. But anyway to make it work, you need a huge number of those notes, there are more nodes representing every single plank scale section of space that there are plank scale sections of space in the observable universe. It’s wild stuff. Lex Friedman has an interview about it here: https://youtu.be/4-SGpEInX_c
QVRedit t1_iwvvlhe wrote
There must be some very granular system at some level.
mentive t1_iwrsewr wrote
Simulation was my first thought....
Finn_3000 t1_iws395d wrote
This is far beyond anything my monkey brain evolved to understand so for that reason, im out.
otas1 t1_iwu9sul wrote
Ok I think I need a ELI5 about what "information" is.
Penisanthonydoubs t1_iwr3x7k wrote
>information bits have no charge or spin
What are information bits, how do you know they're real, and how do you know their properties?
Chimalez t1_iwr4zd2 wrote
Everything I said was relative to the article. An information bit in this case would be any structure on the atomic or even quantum level that contains enough of a pattern to be capable of functioning as information storage (sort of like how computers are made up of logic gates of ones and zeroes, an information bit would be capable of projecting some form of coherent data.)
That's my best attempt at explaining it, please correct me if I am wrong.
Penisanthonydoubs t1_iwr8s2s wrote
>That's my best attempt at explaining it, please correct me if I am wrong.
How could I, you're citing conjecture, it's unfalsifiable
dern_the_hermit t1_iwrrptm wrote
> How could I
By knowing more about the various views on information in the scientific/mathematical discourse. There's been a lot of discussion and work on defining/quantifying information. The general idea holds that ordered structures will have usable data that can be pulled from them, as opposed to a state of total entropy where there is no distinction between structural states, all is uniform and useless.
Penisanthonydoubs t1_iwru8p3 wrote
So if I knew more about information theory, a well developed field of statistics, i would be able say that you're wrong about information bits, a made up word defined in a pop science article trying to guess what dark matter is?
dern_the_hermit t1_iwrufih wrote
I don't think they were inviting you specifically to refute anything, but you really ought to be asking them.
[deleted] t1_iws0kiw wrote
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QVRedit t1_iwsf6rk wrote
Surely charge and spin, require information too, to store their values ?
Penisanthonydoubs t1_iwuz0as wrote
How does that in any way relate to my question
QVRedit t1_iwv03l0 wrote
Yeah, maybe it doesn’t. But the short answer is; we just don’t know !
Penisanthonydoubs t1_iwx9dc4 wrote
You're right, I've actually been thinking the dark matter might be the result of invisible fairies with diarrhea. Guess we'll never know for sure
QVRedit t1_iwy8a9x wrote
Well we can be fairly sure that that particular explanation is not the case..
Penisanthonydoubs t1_iwyg8fk wrote
Yeah, maybe it's not. But the short answer is; we just don’t know !
OnePay622 t1_iwugc7b wrote
I dont know we literally transmit information with light and that has no mass.....so is it a special kind of information?
heckdditor t1_iwpu4o3 wrote
Hold on... I am going with you. I need a dark and bitter coffee.
JimmiRustle t1_iwpvjvm wrote
What does it mean to enjoy dark coffee?
heckdditor t1_iwpvom8 wrote
coffee full of energy and information, cheers
fullawe t1_iwspcnd wrote
They're saying that the probability of the fundamental particle characteristics (% chance of a electron or other particule having a particle spin/location), is physical and has a measurable weight. This probability chart is 'an information bit'.
The team has proposed an experiment that involves shooting an electron beam (at CERN) into positrons. They have proposed an expected outcome and if they are correct it would be very significant proof of theory. That information does have weight and needs to be accounted for.
Thud t1_iwswqf1 wrote
Basically, dark matter is the comments in the source code of the universe. Probably a lot of TODO statements.
DarthGinsu t1_iwt8pk1 wrote
Damn it, Morpheus, get me out.
tenno0o t1_iwtpgp9 wrote
ok hear me out, what if those 'particals' are like Zombie-Particals? And they just exist for the search of mass to gather?
Absolute amateur here btw so pls don't stone me
dioxol-5-yl t1_iwx2sco wrote
Just look at the two most recent citations - him and only him. This is something he came up with and published in low tier journals as the sole author. That means that it's not definitely wrong but it's likely an obscure theory that nobody else thinks is likely hence the sole author in not great journals. I wouldn't over think it, as it's hardly something that has a lot of academic support behind it
Stark_Athlon t1_iwrfrpn wrote
I'm an idiot. A confused one, at that: how does it have energy if it's not spinning?
EntropicallyGrave t1_iwrgohy wrote
since i'm right here - "spin" is this other thing; it can only be "up" or "down"... electrons have it
QVRedit t1_iwscr1m wrote
Spin is a information state of some kinds of particles, anything with charge also seems to have spin.
Neutrons may have spin, because of being made up of quarks.
s1ngular1ty2 t1_iwsh4qg wrote
Spin doesn't mean it is actually spinning. It is a way to describe how it interacts with a measurement machine when the spin is measured. Spin is how the particle is deflected in the presence of a magnetic field. The particle is not spinning like a top. It's confusing I know.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-exactly-is-the-spin/
7heCulture t1_iws4v74 wrote
Sooo… dark matter is the collection of all souls (expressions of minds/information) of all living beings from the past, present and future? I see a book from P.F. Hamilton there… akin to the void trilogy
QVRedit t1_iwsccr0 wrote
No - it would be the information content if the space, including the matter.
Seiren- t1_iws9tuw wrote
The universe is a simulation, clearly, ‘information bit’. Dark matter is just the 1s and 0s that make up the backdrop of the universe
s1ngular1ty2 t1_iwpsdlb wrote
This article is very bad. It is mostly incorrect about many things. I wouldn't put much stock in their "theory".
Chimalez t1_iwpu0o4 wrote
What is it incorrect about?
s1ngular1ty2 t1_iws95xf wrote
We are pretty sure dark matter is matter, which is why it's called dark matter not dark information. We have many observations that suggest it is a particle of some kind. We have decades of discoveries that prove dark matter is real. Just because we haven't detected the particles themselves yet doesn't mean it isn't still matter. It can be weakly interacting matter we can not detect because it barely interacts with other matter. It can be exotic large mass particles we can not produce in our colliders because they are limited to lower energies and lower masses. There are many reasons why we may not be able to detect it with any means we have and yet it still exists and is still matter.
This article is laughable at best.
QVRedit t1_iwsc79l wrote
The reason it’s been called ‘dark matter’ is because we can’t see it, but it has gravity, like matter does, hence ‘dark matter’.
The article suggests this might be information, based on an equivalency.
We generally here very little about the information content of the universe, but clearly it must exist somewhere, somehow.
s1ngular1ty2 t1_iwsdah9 wrote
The leading theories for what it is are mostly particle based theories. That was my point. I understand it exhibits gravity. That is the sole reason we know it exists.
There are custom made particle detectors all over the Earth trying to find dark matter every second of every day. They are giant contraptions which are almost solely searching for dark matter by many different means. It is one of the most active fields of study right now because understanding what dark matter is, is super important and will probably win you a nobel prize if you figure it out.
fullawe t1_iwspylj wrote
The team behind this have proposed a pretty easy and sensible experiment. The article is terrible, but the theory of information having weight is pretty cool.
The idea that the probability chart for any given fundamental particle, has physical weight. The probability chart for any given particle interaction becomes a bit, and they have proposed an information 'particle' size.
The experiment is shooting an electron beam into positrons at CERN (through a moderator), and measuring the outcome. The team has proposed an expected outcome to support their findings.
Raging-Bool t1_iwq158g wrote
Technically I believe this would count as a hypothesis, and not a theory. If the hypothesis is found to have some testable corroboration, then it can be elevated to a theory.
fullawe t1_iwsnecx wrote
The article talks about an experiment that was proposed in March this year. It doesn't say what the experiment is.
LastExitToSalvation t1_iwpwkzv wrote
The nugget here is the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, where information is physically real and has a quantifiable mass. That's it. That's the article. They took an already existing theory and just said, yeah the information is dark matter, done. Case closed. But I didn't see anything "new" in this article that evidences this. Maybe someone else caught it.
HeberSeeGull t1_iwtyx4c wrote
Love the imagery of your username. You would make a lively and provocative dinner guest with that colorful imagination of yours.
Next time I’m driving down the freeway I’ll be looking for your exit. I wonder how many exits to salvation precede the last one? What if I travel past this last exit? What if I’m texting and traveling and miss this last exit? Damn, that texting had done me in again. 🥴
ryschwith t1_iwqdso9 wrote
I think what I want here, before forming an opinion on it, is a better idea of what “information” means in this context. I get the impression it’s more closely related to entropy than to “this collection of bits is a cat GIF” but I’d like more clarity.
newsphilosophy OP t1_iwpqfm1 wrote
There is no shortage of debate about the nature of dark matter, a mysterious substance that many believe makes up a large proportion of the total mass of the universe, in spite of never having observed it directly. Now some believe that Landauer’s principle, which dictates the physical nature of information, is raising a startling possibility: that dark matter might be information itself, writes physics lecturer Melvin Vopson.
anonymyth t1_iwq1qkl wrote
All energy is information, so it would stand that dark matter would also be information
bad13wolf t1_iwqrg63 wrote
Isn't everything information in some form or another?
Feisty-Management-87 t1_iws2gqf wrote
Yes, exactly. Everything already is information. I like the thought experiment and all but like...how does one quantify such a subjection concept such as information. Maybe dark matter is just emotion without mass, or thought, or ideas without mass. I'm sure there is something I'm missing in the theory but like...information already isn't a thing, it's what we have decided any particular thing or set of things represents/means to us. It's symbolic. Is dark matter symbology without mass? I just can't with rhis..
maolf t1_iws3l1m wrote
Private member variables that the simulation implementation needs. Not something users should be messing with.
rainshifter t1_iwspfb1 wrote
Should? Perhaps not. But we entertain the idea of overwriting their data via reinterpreted pointer, offset from the base address of the instantiated object containing them.
maolf t1_iwsw1ok wrote
You’re going to invoke undefined behavior. It’s a bad idea.
Captain-Neck-Beard t1_iwruh7a wrote
Yeah I’ve always thought that dark matter was globs of particles that interact with the Higgs field but don’t interact with EM fields. You can’t see it because it does not absorb, reflect or refract light. You can’t touch it because it has no charge or spin. It has mass so it explains why galaxies have enough mass to stay together. Like an invisible, untouchable, attractive force.
1stFunestist t1_iwqfr22 wrote
So, essentially some version of simulation theory is correct.
ChargeOk1005 t1_iwq0tme wrote
Wait, so His Dark Materials was right all along?
MackTuesday t1_iwr7dzb wrote
It would take a *vast* amount of information to account for the mass of dark matter in the observable universe, something like 10^80 bits, and that's for a small, warm universe. For our big, cold universe, it would be much more.
gurbblurb t1_iwrj1gp wrote
It says in the article that they estimated around 52 x 10^96 bits in the observable universe.
fullawe t1_iwsq6gr wrote
The theory posts that every particle interaction requires an information particle, so there would be many orders of magnitude more information particles than regular particles.
Seattle_gldr_rdr t1_iwr9zel wrote
Cosmic TMP folder. What happens when God empties it?
cynical_gramps t1_iwro5g3 wrote
Or, you know, it’s an artifact of our poor understanding of gravity
Mgl1206 t1_iwtbyfn wrote
…. You know I was literally thinking what if this was true but for dark energy instead. Since it somehow never decreased in volume despite the universe expanding. Yeah it’s kinda weak since information is not made but only changed and dark energy is somehow being made or something like that but as I was saying.
I then expanded on that and thought of a fictional story setting where you could have an organization that’s trained to read the information that’s stored in dark energy. And have the typical power struggle storyline in that setting with those in power trying to rewrite the information in dark energy for their own gain. This leading to a whole social upheaval as nothing can be relied upon to be true anymore since the entire society had grown to depend on the information stored in dark energy.
And I’m now realizing this is an allegory for our over reliance on the internet for information and truth, and also a commentary on our current society in general.….. that’s actually an interesting idea…. Huh
codemonkey80 t1_iwtryiz wrote
twitter is helping speed up the rotation of the milky way
catrastroTonic t1_iwrfagr wrote
Love the "hard drive" question. If you have a never-used hard drive it ought to have less mass than a heavily used one full of ordered zeroes and ones....right? But wait: is an unused hard drive filled with zeroes? If so, isn't a long, long string of zeroes information too? Just as a "null" hypothesis is just as informative as a confirmed finding ... sometimes actually more informative.
evil0sheep t1_iwsqxek wrote
I think in this theory all zeros is information and random data is also information right? like the information particles represent the state of the bits on the hard drive, whatever they may be. I don't think reading or writing to the drive changes its mass here right?
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Revolutionary_Tax546 t1_iwtn3sp wrote
That's like saying that flushing the toilet is information itself.
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NatLawson t1_iws395g wrote
Steven Hawking suggest Imaginary number algorithms underlie "information" collected by a blackhole as it ages. I have begun to form and "opinion" that this process creates folds and eminates in space time.
Unlike a gravity well or a gravity field it is a coherence which produces a before and after, a past and future in a singular immutable direction. Quantum gravity aka "Quantum Time" is a consequence of this interaction.
Consider a photon travesl a billion light years to our eyes. The distance, at the speed of light without interference, is incomprehensible. If all possible outcomes of the photons travel are percieved space time would be indistinguishable. Instead, we perceive the photon within space time as immediate. Not that other coherences don't interfere? They do at massive scales, galactic scales as does the galactic scale of black hole interactions.
plugthree t1_iws3v2b wrote
Not sure I quite understand the part about information theory, but came here to say I found this article does an usually good job at explaining dark matter.
plugthree t1_iws40ve wrote
Ok, not so much “explaining it”, since nobody can explain it. But great historical context.
s1ngular1ty2 t1_iwsi71l wrote
The article is bad since the most commonly accepted description of dark matter is some exotic particle we have not yet discovered. The article says dark matter isn't particles. So how can it be correct? Researchers across the world are actively searching for dark matter particles because most of them believe it is a particle...
Siltala t1_iwtt2ot wrote
Most get funding for searching for a particle. Never underestimate how much of science is dictated by funding
s1ngular1ty2 t1_iwuq71q wrote
Most think it is a particle...
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Vlistorito t1_iwsq7lk wrote
Are there any ways of estimating how many information particles would be required to govern the properties of the matter we see in the universe? So that we could check to see if the mass of dark matter agrees with that number?
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brzuno t1_iwtoytw wrote
He had tried to “flight” but not having the opportunity he had to “fight” and therefore…wait sorry…wrong thread!
atremblein t1_iwtuykv wrote
Isn't it problematic to quantify things as such like I don't see how this would lead physics anywhere. And isn't more research coming out disproving dark matter?
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YourFatherUnfiltered t1_iwpqvhv wrote
Im going with it doesn't exist at all and our model just needs to be fixed.
DefectiveSp00n t1_iwpx4vt wrote
I think it was a hot fix by the moderators to ensure gravity was properly simulated.
framingXjake t1_iwq8hbj wrote
I believe the game was Quake III Arena, but there was a physics engine gravity problem in the development phase of the game. They needed a way to calculate inverse roots (i = 1/√x) quickly, but couldn't do it since you pretty much always get long ass floating point numbers which aren't very accurate sometimes, especially with roots and fractions. So some guy on the dev team came about some ass-backwards solution that makes absolutely zero sense in any regard, but somehow still worked nearly flawlessly. He fixed the games gravity with math that doesn't make any fucking sense whatsoever. If you scroll through the games code to find these lines of physics engine voodoo fuckery, the dev team left a comment that literally says "what the fuck?" If we can find the dev who solved that problem, maybe we can get him to answer our dark matter questions.
https://medium.com/five-guys-facts/the-fast-inverse-square-root-7f9e1fbaa2d
edit: Correction, the calculation was for lighting and reflection effects. My mistake, I heard most of this story secondhand from a professor I had in college.
Kriegenstein t1_iwqo1yy wrote
It was used in lighting and reflection calculations, not gravity. Still cool though.
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DeltaV-Mzero t1_iwqbomr wrote
They do actually explain why it works in that article (thanks for the link btw!)
But I can’t imagine thinking that up, understanding it is tricky enough
framingXjake t1_iwqzaw1 wrote
Ahhh I didn't read the very end of it lol. Yeah, but the math is definitely obscure. Like who even thought of the idea of reading a single precision IEEE 754 binary number as a binary integer? That's like reading a German book even though you can only read English, and yet by the end of the book, everything somehow still makes sense.
JimmiRustle t1_iwqvjnu wrote
Our model does need to be fixed.
Useurnoodle37 t1_iws3d18 wrote
This sounds stupid but thought that dark matter was a bunch of primordial black holes and that dark energy's effect of accelerating the expa siin of the universe was just them decaying in such vast quantites that the space just sort of gets more un bunched like a spring with woeghts being taken off it
HeberSeeGull t1_iwty6t4 wrote
What do you get when you mix dark matter with brain matter? The Big Bang. 🥴
VaguelyFamiliarVoice t1_iwpsct1 wrote
“The information bit has therefore the characteristics of a scalar boson particle with no charge, no spin, no any other properties except mass / energy.”
Okay. I’m going to go ahead and just enjoy my cup of coffee and let others unwind this.