Physics for Philosophers? Welcome back!

 

Physics for Philosophers? Welcome back!

 

From the Age of Enlightenment up to present day, Physics with the help of Mathematics has changed and continues to profoundly change the World and the vision that Man has of it. But in all this time, neither Philosophy nor the Philosophy of Science has remained at a standstill, if we think of the birth of the STOQ disciplines (Science, Theology and the Ontological Quest) in various universities including some Pontifical ones; thanks also to the John Templeton Foundation as well as the STOQ Foundation. Rather, it can be said that the contrast that arose between Humanism and Scientism, if on one hand it created obstacles, on the other it produced the need for a rapprochement between disciplines that were once fused together or, if you prefer, jointly "con-fused". In this regard, it is enough to remember Aristotelian Physics and Metaphysics up to the Theology (e.g. Treatise on the Apocalypse) and the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica of Isac Newton (defined by someone as "a theologian lent to Science").

"Physics for Philosophers (ISBN 978-88-430-9962-7)" is also the (translated) title of a recent book by Carlo Cosmelli for the course held at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Sapienza University of Rome. A commendable attempt to locally recreate a bridge between two disciplines which, starting from a precise same origin, have not been able to avoid the separatist tensions of History to leave room for specialist approaches. Ultimately "Physics for Philosophers" can be considered an attempt to rediscover and grasp meaning not only in the specialized approach to problems, but also and above all in the holistic approach. Specialization or multidisciplinarity, science or humanism, can in fact only be two different attitudes towards Knowledge, but they cannot constitute a choice for Human Knowledge because it is oriented towards an asymptotic limit: unique, intact and unattainable in any case. Knowledge has no limits, has no age, has no boundaries and cannot be the subject of any form of royalties. In this regard, precisely at a time when the debate on artificial intelligence has opened between opportunities and concerns, the reflective contribution offered by Melvin M. Vopson (School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth PO1 3QL, United Kingdom) appears commendable, in particular with his most recent work "The second law of infodynamics and its implications for the simulated universe hypothesis" (Oct.2023). A hypothesis that  M.Vopson himself does not hesitate to define as a philosophical theory, but full of reflections and arguments, especially regarding symmetry. Below is a series of works and the related abstracts, also due to the potential great relevance and great interest that these research works seem to have in the context of a Physics (II)  course for Philosophers at Sapienza University of Rome . The exchange of correspondence with Melvin Vopson - also reported below. - clarifies the context that gave rise to this post.

 

---------------------------------------Correspondence exchanged---------------------------------------

Dear Professor Vopson,

You literally made me tremble with the proposal of your conjectures potentially transformable into real principles of physics, if proven experimentally. I also thought about whether information processes somehow bind the parties involved together from time to time, leading them to interact together and thus create stronger bonds that require more bonding energy than would be needed without interaction. (As for example quarks do in a proton or neutron through gluons). I even went so far as to ask myself whether the mass - as Relativity teaches us - was not missing some attribute to be truly representative of the equivalent energy content and whether the Rienmann tensor (Ricci + Weyl) also took into account a binding IT contribution,  as well as a magnetic contribution if the mass has a magnetic/electric field that interacts and binds. I asked myself if it will ever be possible in the new physics to have a formulation of Total Energy, with many different components, in the manner of Bernoulli in hydraulics, in such a way that if in a process that moves A to B it is clear which of the various components of the Total Energy varies and how, leaving the Principle of Conservation of Energy intact. Maybe we could discover that some bonds can produce energy by extracting it from the unexpected (e.g. Zero-Point-Energy?).

Therefore, if I had the financial possibilities of a great philanthropist and benefactor of humanity, I would also finance your research to verify, through matter-antimatter annihilation, your theory on "The mass-energy-information equivalence principle", also to discover whether all the information in the universe can be stored in a mass that can be contained in a shopping bag and whether or not to do so we would have to consume a good part of all the humanly available energy.

Thank you Prof. Vopson for these works which I summarize below and which - with your permission -  I would like to put on my blog together with this letter available to those who are interested in the topic.

Kind Regards

Rocco Morelli

 

1.       THE MASS-ENERGY-INFORMATION EQUIVALENCE PRINCIPLE

AIP Advances 9, 095206 (2019); doi: 10.1063/1.5123794 – by Melvin M. Vopson -  University of Portsmouth, School of Mathematics and Physics, PO1 3QL Portsmouth, UK

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/9/9/095206/1076232/The-mass-energy-information-equivalence-principle 

ABSTRACT

Landauer’s principle formulated in 1961 states that logical irreversibility implies physical irreversibility and demonstrated that information is physical. Here we formulate a new principle of mass-energy-information equivalence proposing that a bit of information is not just physical, as already demonstrated, but it has a finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information. In this framework, it is shown that the mass of a bit of information at room temperature (300K) is 3.19 × 10^-38 Kg. To test the hypothesis we propose here an experiment, predicting that the mass of a data storage device would increase by a small amount when is full of digital information relative to its mass in erased state. For 1Tb device the estimated mass change is 2.5 × 10^-25 Kg.

 

2.       THE INFORMATION CATASTROPHE

AIP Advances 10, 085014 (2020); doi: 10.1063/5.0019941 – by Melvin M. Vopson - School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Portsmouth, PO1 3QL Portsmouth, United Kingdom

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/10/8/085014/990263/The-information-catastrophe

ABSTRACT

Currently, we produce ∼1021 digital bits of information annually on Earth. Assuming a 20% annual growth rate, we estimate that after ∼350 years from now, the number of bits produced will exceed the number of all atoms on Earth, ∼10⁵⁰. After ∼300 years, the power required to sustain this digital production will exceed 18.5 × 10¹⁵ W, i.e., the total planetary power consumption today, and after ∼500 years from now, the digital content will account for more than half Earth’s mass, according to the mass-energy–information equivalence principle. Besides the existing global challenges such as climate, environment, population, food, health, energy, and security, our estimates point to another singular event for our planet, called information catastrophe.

 

3.       ESTIMATION OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THE VISIBLE MATTER OF THE UNIVERSE

AIP Advances 11, 105317 (2021); doi: 10.1063/5.0064475 – by Melvin M. Vopson-  University of Portsmouth, School of Mathematics and Physics, PO1 3QL Portsmouth, UK

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/11/10/105317/661214/Estimation-of-the-information-contained-in-the

ABSTRACT

The information capacity of the universe has been a topic of great debate since the 1970s and continues to stimulate multiple branches of physics research. Here, we used Shannon’s information theory to estimate the amount of encoded information in all the visible matter in the universe. We achieved this by deriving a detailed formula estimating the total number of particles in the observable universe, known as the Eddington number, and by estimating the amount of information stored by each particle about itself. We determined that each particle in the observable universe contains 1.509 bits of information and there are ∼6 × 1080 bits of information stored in all the matter particles of the observable universe.

 

4.       EXPERIMENTAL PROTOCOL FOR TESTING THE MASS–ENERGY–INFORMATION EQUIVALENCE PRINCIPLE

AIP Advances 12, 035311 (2022); doi: 10.1063/5.0087175 – by Melvin M. Vopson -  University of Portsmouth, School of Mathematics and Physics, PO1 3QL Portsmouth, UK

 https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/12/3/035311/2819739/Experimental-protocol-for-testing-the-mass-energy

ABSTRACT

The mass–energy–information equivalence principle proposed in 2019 and the information content of the observable matter in the universe estimated in 2021 represent two important conjectures, called the information conjectures. Combining information theory and physical principles of thermodynamics, these theoretical proposals made specific predictions about the mass of information as well as the most probable information content per elementary particle. Here, we propose an experimental protocol that allows for empirical verification of the information conjectures by confirming the predicted information content of elementary particles. The experiment involves a matter–antimatter annihilation process. When an electron–positron annihilates, in addition to the two 511 keV gamma photons resulting from the conversion of their rest masses into energy, we predict that two additional low energy photons should be detected, resulting from their information content erasure. At room temperature, a positron–electron annihilation should produce two ∼50 μm wavelength infrared photons due to the information erasure. This experiment could, therefore, confirm both information conjectures and the existence of information as the fifth state of matter in the universe.

---------------------------------------Correspondence exchanged--------------------------------------

Dear Rocco,

I hope you don't mind addressing you by your first name, but if you do please accept my apologies. Also, please call me Melvin.

Thank you very much for your email and for sharing your interesting ideas about possible extrapolations and applications of my research.

I can confirm that most of the things you suggested are aligned with my own ideas, and this gives me the necessary support and confidence in this work. 

Please feel free to list on your blog anything you wish. 

As you said, these are "conjectures potentially transformable into real principles of physics, if proven experimentally."

However, I would like to share with you my most recent work, which indeed translates into a new "law of physics" and, unlike the mass-energy-information equivalence principle which requires experimental validation, this new work is already validated.

Here is the link to the article (free to download). I promise you, this one makes a really interesting reading.

https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0173278

Once again, many thanks for reaching out.

Yours,

Melvin

Dr. Melvin M. Vopson FHEA, FInstP, CPhys
Associate Professor of Physics and CEO of the Information Physics Institute

School of Mathematics & Physics
University of Portsmouth
Portsmouth  PO1 3HF

United Kingdom

 

5.               THE SECOND LAW OF INFODYNAMICS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR THE  SIMULATED UNIVERSE HYPOTHESIS

AIP Advances 13, 105308 (2023); doi: 10.1063/5.0173278– by Melvin M. Vopson -  University of Portsmouth, School of Mathematics and Physics, PO1 3QL Portsmouth, UK

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/13/10/105308/2915332/The-second-law-of-infodynamics-and-its

ABSTRACT

The simulation hypothesis is a philosophical theory, in which the entire universe and our objective reality are just simulated constructs. Despite the lack of evidence, this idea is gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry. Recent scientific devel[1]opments in the field of information physics, such as the publication of the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, appear to support this possibility. In particular, the 2022 discovery of the second law of information dynamics (infodynamics) facilitates new and interesting research tools at the intersection between physics and information. In this article, we re-examine the second law of infodynamics and its applicability to digital information, genetic information, atomic physics, mathematical symmetries, and cosmology, and we provide scientific evidence that appears to underpin the simulated universe hypothesis.

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6. CONCLUSION

Let's hope that Carlo Cosmelli and Sapienza University of Rome, even on the basis of what has been indicated above, will be well disposed and inclined to activate a second course in Physics (II) for Philosophers which could contain these highly topical themes.

7. APPENDIX

Even if the blue dotted line will be the one along which human civilization could presumably move in the next two centuries, this still does not remain a reassuring prospect for future generations.