Information has mass

Aupmanyav said:

What was Bosonic matter constituted of, photons, gluons, etc.?

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Yes. Do you understand the difference between fermionic, bosonic, baryonic, and leptonic matter?

Photons are fundamental particles. So are quarks, gluons, electrons, neutrinos, and a few others. They are not 'made of' anything more basic. They have properties, like energy, spin, parity, etc.

Bosons are those with full integer spin. Fermions are those with half-integer spin. The two basic types have different statistics, making them have very different properties. For example, electrons are fermions and obey the Pauli exclusion principle, which is one reason why atoms are stable. Quarks are also fermions. But gluons and photons are bosons: they do NOT obey the exclusion principle.

Baryons are those composite particles made from quarks. They are subject to the strong force. Leptons, like electrons are not subject to the strong force.

And preons, etc. But science has not yet said that particles/mass/matter are composed of energy (this IMHO is the categorical statement and you too seem to be saying that). What are then, they composed of? How come they sometimes appear as wave, photons, for example.

Aupmanyav said:

And preons, etc. But science has not yet said that particles/mass/matter are composed of energy (this IMHO is the categorical statement and you too seem to be saying that). What are then, they composed of? How come they sometimes appear as wave, photons, for example.

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Once again, the particles *are* also wave phenomena. Those wave have the same properties: energy, momentum, spin, parity, etc. The particles are not 'composed' of any of those.

They are not 'composed' of anything more basic. That is the whole point.

Of course, if string theory is correct, there is a sense in which all particles are vibrations in strings. But even there, there is no more fundamental composition and energy is a property of that string, not the composition of that string.

Note: the term preon is archaic and no longer used.

Aupmanyav said:

And preons, etc. But science has not yet said that particles/mass/matter are composed of energy (this IMHO is the categorical statement and you too seem to be saying that). What are then, they composed of? How come they sometimes appear as wave, photons, for example.

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Hmm, you need a physics course, which is not really possible on this forum.

Wave-particle duality is a feature of quantum theory. All entities at the atomic scale (the scale at which Planck's constant has significance) have features both of waves and of particles. This says nothing in particular about energy, though. Waves can have energy just as much as particles can - as anyone who has been knocked over by a wave on the beach can testify. Quantum theory accounts for how it is that atomic-scale entities can have both features.

Nobody is saying anything is "composed of energy". That is plain wrong and @Polymath257 and I have been saying the opposite throughout this thread. Some subatomic entities are made up of others and some, e.g. quarks and electrons are - according to the prevailing model - elementary, not made up of anything. They are what they are, period. Not even the particles of light, photons, are "composed of energy".

It is scientifically illiterate to say that anything is "composed of energy".

atanu said:

Dr Melvin Vopson of the University of Portsmouth advances ‘it from bit’ concept of John Wheeler, who coined the phrase and the idea that every particle in the universe emanates from the information locked inside it. At the Santa Fe Institute in 1989, Wheeler proposed that everything, from particles to forces to the fabric of spacetime itself "… derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely … from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits."

Vopson says that not only is information the essential unit of the universe but also that it is energy and has mass. He unifies and coordinates special relativity with the Landauer Principle (which is named after Rolf Landauer) which predicts that erasing even one bit of information would release a calculable tiny amount of heat.

What will it all mean, if the concept is correct?

Part Einstein, part Landauer

...

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I have never understood what information means in a physical sense.
I guess I'm too invested in the computer science meaning where information is an abstract construct (that can have an arbitrary physical representation).

With that kind of picture of "information" it is hard to understand why there should be conservation of information and why loss of information in a black hole is a paradox.
I have similar problems with understanding the Landauer principle or how information can have mass.

Can someone explain it to me or lead me to a (preferable online) source that explains scientific information to a dummy (computer scientist)?

Heyo said:

I have never understood what information means in a physical sense.
I guess I'm too invested in the computer science meaning where information is an abstract construct (that can have an arbitrary physical representation).

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Except that it cannot have an arbitrary physical representation. There has to be a detectable difference between however 0 is stored and however 1 is stored. Whether it be the direction of a magnetic field, the spin of some electron, the state of some transistor, there has to be some way to discern between 0 and 1, and usually to transfer that difference to another location.

That puts the CS idea of information into a more general context, which is the way that physical states can carry information, transfer it, store it and erase it. And *that* puts us into thermodynamics because there is a strong analogy between information in the CS sense and entropy in thermodynamics. At base, the equations are very, very similar.

With that kind of picture of "information" it is hard to understand why there should be conservation of information and why loss of information in a black hole is a paradox.

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This gets to the notions of reversibility and irreversibility. In essence, entropy represents our *lack* of information about the microscopic details of a physical state. The fact that entropy always increases in a closed system corresponds to the idea that we are always losing that detailed information as time goes on. This is why some reactions can only happen one direction in time: even though the basic equations are symmetric in time, the information less is one-way.

And this isn't an issue in classical physics. But, in quantum mechanics, there is a requirement that things evolve in what is known as a 'unitary' manner. And unitarity, it is known, preserves information. For most physical situations, this is fine because it is a difference between a low level viewpoint and a high level viewpoint.The information is still there.

But, at black holes, there is an irreversible loss of information when something passes the event horizon. And *that* is one of the big reasons it is difficult to unify gravity and quantum mechanics. It isn't simply a lack of low level information: even that low level information has disappeared past the event horizon. It is the corresponding violation of unitarity that is the problem.

I have similar problems with understanding the Landauer principle or how information can have mass.

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Again, this comes from the thermodynamics of the situation. In essence, it turns out that heat is released whenever information is erased. The amount of heat generated is directly proportional to the number of bits erased and corresponds to an entropy per bit of information. If this did not happen, we would be able to construct a perpetual motion machine using stored and erased information (using an analog of Maxwell's demon).

Technically, a bit of information corresponds to a certain amount of entropy. The amount of heat is the product of that entropy and the temperature. So, to erase a bit at a cold temperature emits less energy that erasing the same bit at a higher temperature.

it is then the equivalence between energy and mass that leads to the claim that information has mass. This isn't quite true since, as I noted above, the information corresponds to entropy, not energy. The amount of energy (and hence, mass) depends on the temperature.

Can someone explain it to me or lead me to a (preferable online) source that explains scientific information to a dummy (computer scientist)?

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Hopefully this helped a bit. Or two.

Polymath257 said:

Note: the term preon is archaic and no longer used.

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Yeah, I understand. Wikipedia has a list of names suggested by the scientists.

"Other names which have been used for these proposed fundamental particles (or particles intermediate between the most fundamental particles and those observed in the Standard Model) include prequarks, subquarks, maons, alphons, quinks, rishons, tweedles, helons, haplons, Y-particles, and primons."

If particles are not energy, then they arise out of nothing, ex-nihilo, due to "Quantum ...". Not Quantum asymmetry, because that comes after they are present, Quantum upheaval, Quantum disturbance.
'Winner' to one who tells me where the fundamental particles arise from.
Irrespective of whether Polymath or Ex-chemist get a 'winner' from me or not, I am thankful to them to have better enlightened a dense ignorant person like me.
They should try to get a 'winner' from me which they can keep in the cupboard of their living room and show it around.

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Aupmanyav said:

@Polymath257 said: "All I can say is that you misunderstand the concept of energy as used in physics."
OR perhaps science has not yet realized that, being a little myopic and missing the larger picture.
What was there before the advent of Baryonic matter?

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I believe there is a misunderstanding from your perspective of energy used? in physics. Your religious view cannot help science realize anything.

Aupmanyav said:

Yeah, I understand. Wikipedia has a list of names suggested by the scientists.
If particles are not energy, then they arise out of nothing, ex-nihilo, due to "Quantum ...". Not Quantum asymmetry, because that comes after they are present, Quantum upheaval, Quantum disturbance.
'Winner' to one who tells me how the fundamental particles arise.
Irrespective of whether Polymath or Ex-chemist get a 'winner' from me or not, I am thankful to them to have better enlightened a dense ignorant person like me.
They should try to get a 'winner' from me which they can keep in the cupboard of their living room and show it around.

Cheap Weightlifting Trophies | Body Building Trophies

Click to expand...

I believe this a misuse of the philosophical "ex-nihilo" which proposes that everything is created from a state of absolute nothing, or the philosophical nothingness. Greatly needs clarification.

give me an idea about how you think particles came about? Bahai Allah?

shunyadragon said:

I believe there is a misunderstanding from your perspective of energy used? in physics. Your religious view cannot help science realize anything.

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My religious views are flexible. They will change according to science. They are not in a book or expounded by a particular person. It is science which will help me realize anything.

Polymath257 said:

Except that it cannot have an arbitrary physical representation. There has to be a detectable difference between however 0 is stored and however 1 is stored. Whether it be the direction of a magnetic field, the spin of some electron, the state of some transistor, there has to be some way to discern between 0 and 1, and usually to transfer that difference to another location.

That puts the CS idea of information into a more general context, which is the way that physical states can carry information, transfer it, store it and erase it. And *that* puts us into thermodynamics because there is a strong analogy between information in the CS sense and entropy in thermodynamics. At base, the equations are very, very similar.



This gets to the notions of reversibility and irreversibility. In essence, entropy represents our *lack* of information about the microscopic details of a physical state. The fact that entropy always increases in a closed system corresponds to the idea that we are always losing that detailed information as time goes on. This is why some reactions can only happen one direction in time: even though the basic equations are symmetric in time, the information less is one-way.

And this isn't an issue in classical physics. But, in quantum mechanics, there is a requirement that things evolve in what is known as a 'unitary' manner. And unitarity, it is known, preserves information. For most physical situations, this is fine because it is a difference between a low level viewpoint and a high level viewpoint.The information is still there.

But, at black holes, there is an irreversible loss of information when something passes the event horizon. And *that* is one of the big reasons it is difficult to unify gravity and quantum mechanics. It isn't simply a lack of low level information: even that low level information has disappeared past the event horizon. It is the corresponding violation of unitarity that is the problem.



Again, this comes from the thermodynamics of the situation. In essence, it turns out that heat is released whenever information is erased. The amount of heat generated is directly proportional to the number of bits erased and corresponds to an entropy per bit of information. If this did not happen, we would be able to construct a perpetual motion machine using stored and erased information (using an analog of Maxwell's demon).

Technically, a bit of information corresponds to a certain amount of entropy. The amount of heat is the product of that entropy and the temperature. So, to erase a bit at a cold temperature emits less energy that erasing the same bit at a higher temperature.

it is then the equivalence between energy and mass that leads to the claim that information has mass. This isn't quite true since, as I noted above, the information corresponds to entropy, not energy. The amount of energy (and hence, mass) depends on the temperature.



Hopefully this helped a bit. Or two.

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Thanks for this. You have nailed what was bothering me about the claim in the OP.

I can see that information loss represents an increase in entropy. But if that is so then it cannot be true that "information is energy", as the author seems to be claiming, because entropy is not energy: temperature comes into it.

What he should have said, surely, is that information x temperature "is" energy. And so, while he can say that information has mass, the amount of mass it has depends on the temperature of the system gaining or losing the information.

And here we get into another conundrum, since temperature is a bulk property of matter in thermodynamic equilibrium and is undefined for, say, an individual quantum state. So I'd have thought that the thermodynamic analogy must eventually break down, as we go to smaller and smaller information-bearing systems.

exchemist said:

Thanks for this. You have nailed what was bothering me about the claim in the OP.

I can see that information loss represents an increase in entropy. But if that is so then it cannot be true that "information is energy", as the author seems to be claiming, because entropy is not energy: temperature comes into it.

What he should have said, surely, is that information x temperature "is" energy. And so, while he can say that information has mass, the amount of mass it has depends on the temperature of the system gaining or losing the information.

And here we get into another conundrum, since temperature is a bulk property of matter in thermodynamic equilibrium and is undefined for, say, an individual quantum state. So I'd have thought that the thermodynamic analogy must eventually break down, as we go to smaller and smaller information-bearing systems.

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Right. And this is one of the deeper issues in thermodynamics.

Here is an old puzzle, but one that is worthy of some thought.

Suppose you have two containers separated by a partition.

In the first scenario, you have the same gas on both sides of the partition. They have the same temperature and the same pressure.

In the second scenario, you have different gases, but still the same temperature and pressure.

In the third scenario, you have two different gases, but the differences are undetectable currently.

In all scenarios, the partition is raised and the gases on the two sides are allowed to mix. How does the entropy change in each scenario?

In the first, because the gases are the same, the entropy change is zero.

In the second, because the gases are different, the entropy increase.

In the third, there is a choice of how to proceed. If you consider the gases to be different, the entropy increases. if you do not, it stays the same. BOTH descriptions are EQUALLY good in describing what happens! If we *never* learn of the difference between the gases, then using a zero entropy change will work in all of our predictions!

Ultimately, the definition of entropy is a matter of how we form 'ensembles' of microscopic states and consider them to all be the same macroscopic state. Furthermore, macroscopic variables like temperature are *defined* by the rate of change of entropy for a change in total energy. But there is an ambiguity when it comes to indistinguishable particles in your system.

One of the things that quantum mechanics does is that it guarantees indistinguishability: two electrons are *always* interchangeable because of how QM works.

Anyway, you are right that a single quantum state doesn't have a temperature. But, an atom can since it has multiple ways to produce the same total energy, and hence actually has an ensemble of different microstates that are macroscopically indistinguishable.

exchemist said:

It is scientifically illiterate to say that anything is "composed of energy".

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I may have helped to spread that rumor, but in my defense I have heard lots of people say it. E=mc^2 probably is the cause of people saying it. I once had a book about subatomic particles which measured the mass of the particles in electron-volts, and I didn't understand why. It also mentioned virtual particles and how it seemed like they appeared by borrowing energy and then had to disappear in order to pay that energy back...or something along those lines. I go the strong impression that it was commonly thought that mass really was thought to be a form of energy.

Brickjectivity said:

I may have helped to spread that rumor, but in my defense I have heard lots of people say it. E=mc^2 probably is the cause of people saying it. I once had a book about subatomic particles which measured the mass of the particles in electron-volts, and I didn't understand why. It also mentioned virtual particles and how it seemed like they appeared by borrowing energy and then had to disappear in order to pay that energy back...or something along those lines. I go the strong impression that it was commonly thought that mass really was thought to be a form of energy.

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Yes, mass is a form of energy. But this is NOT the same as saying that everything is composed of energy. Mass is *one* property of quantum particles, but it is far from the only one. And yes, it can be measured in eV.

But, for example, in spontaneous formation/annihilation events, there is a 'borrowing' of energy, there is also a requirement that things form in pairs so that other properties balance. So, electron-positron pairs where the electron is negatively charged and the positron is positively charged. Other properties like isospin, parity, etc also have to be balanced.

Polymath257 said:

In the third, there is a choice of how to proceed. If you consider the gases to be different, the entropy increases. if you do not, it stays the same. BOTH descriptions are EQUALLY good in describing what happens! If we *never* learn of the difference between the gases, then using a zero entropy change will work in all of our predictions!

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I think now you have stepped into the trap of the computer science definition of information.
Physical information is inherent and independent upon us being able to detect it.
We don't know whether the gases are different, but the universe does.

Brickjectivity said:

I may have helped to spread that rumor, but in my defense I have heard lots of people say it. E=mc^2 probably is the cause of people saying it. I once had a book about subatomic particles which measured the mass of the particles in electron-volts, and I didn't understand why. It also mentioned virtual particles and how it seemed like they appeared by borrowing energy and then had to disappear in order to pay that energy back...or something along those lines. I go the strong impression that it was commonly thought that mass really was thought to be a form of energy.

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Yes, I'm sure you are right that people often misunderstand E=mc² and that may be part of the confusion.

I think a lot of people think mass and energy are alternatives and one is "turned into" the other, according to the formula. But that's wrong: both mass and energy are present together, the one implying the other.That's what the equation means. If you discharge a battery, its weight decreases (though not enough to measure) due to the loss of chemical potential energy. So energy implies mass and vice versa. (One has to be a bit careful where motion is involved, since the long form of Einstein's equation has a momentum term as well, but that's another story.)

It is all too easy for people to think not only that mass is turned into energy, but that somehow matter is being turned into energy, and since matter is "stuff", energy must also be "stuff". That, I am sure, is the crux of the confusion.

But the energy released, say, in a nuclear reaction, is always the energy of something: kinetic energy of daughter nuclei, neutrons, etc., or the electromagnetic energy of radiation in γ-rays.

Heyo said:

I think now you have stepped into the trap of the computer science definition of information.
Physical information is inherent and independent upon us being able to detect it.
We don't know whether the gases are different, but the universe does.

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And yet, when we do actual tests and predictions, it doesn't matter for the results. This is known as the mixing paradox, which is related to Gibb's paradox.

And this goes to the very definition of entropy: the entropy of a system is (Boltzmann's constant times the logarithm of the number of available quantum states). Here, the number of such states is determined by what is *macroscopically* the same. And, in a sense, the entropy represents the loss of information when going from a full microscopic description (involving Avagadro's number of particles) to a macroscopic description (involving just volume, temperature, pressure, and other macroscopic variables).

Polymath257 said:

And yet, when we do actual tests and predictions, it doesn't matter for the results. This is known as the mixing paradox, which is related to Gibb's paradox.

And this goes to the very definition of entropy: the entropy of a system is (Boltzmann's constant times the logarithm of the number of available quantum states). Here, the number of such states is determined by what is *macroscopically* the same. And, in a sense, the entropy represents the loss of information when going from a full microscopic description (involving Avagadro's number of particles) to a macroscopic description (involving just volume, temperature, pressure, and other macroscopic variables).

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"This "paradox" can be explained by carefully considering the definition of entropy. In particular, as concisely explained by Edwin Thompson Jaynes,[2] definitions of entropy are arbitrary." - Gibbs paradox - Wikipedia

I guess physicists still don't really know what entropy is.
Even Professor Moriarty needed 3 attempts to try to explain it in a YouTube video. And as Einstein quipped: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

Heyo said:

"This "paradox" can be explained by carefully considering the definition of entropy. In particular, as concisely explained by Edwin Thompson Jaynes,[2] definitions of entropy are arbitrary." - Gibbs paradox - Wikipedia

I guess physicists still don't really know what entropy is.
Even Professor Moriarty needed 3 attempts to try to explain it in a YouTube video. And as Einstein quipped: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

Click to expand...

The entropy of a system is Boltzmann's constant times the logarithm of the number of accessible quantum states for the system.

Figuring out the consequences of this definition is rather difficult, however. In particular, if the system is not closed, you have to deal with the number of states in the environment. THAT is ultimately what drives things like crystal formation: the playoff between entropy (number of states) and enthalpy (energy of the system--related to entropy change of the environment).

The video is correct: entropy and disorder are NOT the same thing. It is a *very* bad way to explain what is going on, even though it is quite common.

Heyo said:

I think now you have stepped into the trap of the computer science definition of information.
Physical information is inherent and independent upon us being able to detect it.
We don't know whether the gases are different, but the universe does.

Click to expand...

Nice.