How big should our hard drive be to store all the information in the universe?
Since the beginning of the digital age (around the 1970s), theoretical physicists have speculated on possible relationships between information and the physical universe, with various paradoxes and thought experiments aimed at figuring out how or why information might be. encoded in physical matter.
Taking into account that all substances are composed of information that explains the state of the quantum system (also known as quantum information ) and that genetic information is encoded in our DNA, we can express physical reality with data.
Now, a mathematician and professor at the University of Portsmouth (England), Melvin M. Vopson, has provided in a recent investigation published in the journal AIP Advances, new estimates of the amount of information encoded in all the baryonic matter of the universe ( also known as ordinary matter). The focus of this study is based on information theory.
Not an easy answer
According to Vopson, each particle contains 1,509 bits of information and the entire cosmos is approximately 6 × 10 ^ 80, 6 times 10 to the power of 80 bits of information (to put us in the situation, a terabyte is 8,000,000,000,000 bits – 12 zeros-).
This data was obtained by deriving a detailed formula that estimates the total number of particles in the observable universe, known as the Eddington number, and concluding approximately the amount of information stored by each particle about itself using Claude’s information theory. Shannon , which would be 1,509 bits.
“The information capacity of the universe has been a subject of debate for more than half a century,” explains Vopson. “There have been several attempts to estimate the information content of the universe, but in this article, I describe a unique approach that further posits how much information could be compressed into a single elementary particle .”
It is very difficult to define what information is, even though it appears in physical equations and plays a crucial role in objects that are on the edge of physics, such as black holes.
“This is the first time this approach has been taken to measure the information content of the universe and it provides a clear numerical prediction,” says Vopson. “Even if it is not entirely accurate, numerical prediction offers a potential avenue for experimental testing.”
These results are based on previous studies by Vopson, who postulated that information is the fifth state of matter (along with solid, liquid, gas, and plasma) and that dark matter itself could be information. They are also consistent with much research conducted in recent years.
Unsurprisingly, this theory presents some problems, such as where to enter antimatter and neutrinos into the equation. However, it offers a very innovative and completely new means of estimating the information content of the universe, from elementary particles to visible matter as a whole.
Referencia: Estimation of the information contained in the visible matter of the universe. Melvin M. Vopson. AIP Advances (2021).DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0064475
