For my 2,000th post (!) I wanted to write about something big. Something monumental with the potential to change the world. And it doesn’t get much bigger than the game-changing, mind-blowing idea that there’s no such thing as Dark Matter and that instead it’s really “information” that has mass.
Big Think explains:
“Dr. Melvin Vopson of the University of Portsmouth, in the UK, has a hypothesis he calls the mass-energy-information equivalence. It states that information is the fundamental building block of the universe, and it has mass. This accounts for the missing mass within galaxies, thus eliminating the hypothesis of dark matter entirely.
To be clear, the idea that information is an essential building block of the universe isn’t new. Classical Information Theory was first posited by Claude Elwood Shannon, the ‘father of the digital age‘ in the mid-20th century. The mathematician and engineer, well-known in scientific circles—but not so much outside of them, had a stroke of genius back in 1940. He realized that Boolean algebra coincided perfectly with telephone switching circuits. Soon, he proved that mathematics could be employed to design electrical systems.
Shannon was hired at Bell Labs to figure out how to transfer information over a system of wires. He wrote the bible on using mathematics to set up communication systems, thereby laying the foundation for the digital age. Shannon was also the first to define one unit of information as a bit.
There was perhaps no greater proponent of information theory than another unsung paragon of science, John Archibald Wheeler. Wheeler was part of the Manhattan Project, worked out the ‘S-Matrix’ with Niels Bohr and helped Einstein develop a unified theory of physics. In his later years, he proclaimed, ‘Everything is information’. Then he went about exploring connections between quantum mechanics and information theory.
He also coined the phrase ‘it from bit’ or that every particle in the universe emanates from the information locked inside it. At the Santa Fe Institute in 1989, Wheeler announced 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 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.”
For what it’s worth I think Vopson’s theory is 100% true. Of course, I’m not a physicist and I won’t be conducting any experiments to verify it. And it may not even explain Dark Matter. That could still be something else entirely different. But for my money the idea that “information” is central to understanding the nature of the Universe makes perfect sense and I hope that as time goes on we come to understand even more about it.
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