On The Meaning of Information Information can be a strange thing to contemplate, and for many, it is a concept impossible to imagine. It would be about as successful as imagining all the matter that made up reality. It is hard enough to imagine that we could potentially squeeze every bit of matter the earth is made of inside a matchbox! So what is information? It turns out that information isn't real at all, but it has reall effects on the universe. Information doesn't have any mass or energy, and neither can we see it, smell it or touch it... It exists in absolutely everything, but it doesn't seem to have a position, or substence. This is because information is what gives rise to substence and texture. It also gives rise to every property that makes up the intrinsic qualities of all of matter. It even makes up the instrinsic information of space and time... So information plays the biggest role known. Now, information will take on different roles, and that must mean that some information will have different properties themselves, such as speed. Some of these information waves will travel at lightspeed. According to Einstein, nothing can travel faster-than-light... Let's investigate this. For a good arguement for superluminal speeds comes from anomalous dispersion in wave mechanics. The phase velocity of a wave is the rate at which a ''phase'' of the wave propagates in space. This is the speed at which the phase of any one frequency component of the wave will propagate. You could pick one particular phase of the wave and it would appear to move at the phase velocity. The phase velocity is given in terms of the wave's angular frequency, which is represented as w and wave vector k by: V, = w/k p It turns out though, that the phase velocity of electromagnetic radiation may the velocity of ''c'' > the speed of light in a vacuum under some special circumstances, but (according to general thought) this does not indicate any superluminal information or energy transfer. This is called anomalous dispersion. Is it possible to break the lightspeed barrier? Well, no. Exceeding the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, is supposed to be completely impossible according to Einsteins relativity papers. According to Einstein, it would require an infinite amount of energy. This is true. But this is based on systems containing energy and mass. As we have already been told as well, superluminal speeds also hold some strange consequences when time is involved. And how strange is this? An astronaut moving beyond light speed would theoretically arrive at his destination before leaving! Thus, if you go far and fast enough, you end up exactly where you began... Now, two German physicists have claimed to make light particles exceed its own velocity using the strange phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling. Quantum tunnelling is a well known phenomenon that occurs as a direct result of the strange uncertainty which pervades nature at very small scales. Tunnelling is also involved in radioactivity and nuclear fusion, and according to theory, quantum tunnelling helps make the sun shine, and according to the minority, tunnelling also had something to do with the existence of the universe. Their research involved an experiment in which microwave photons, which are just another one of the several wavelengths of photons, appeared to travel "instantaneously" between two prisms forming the halves of a cube placed a metre apart. When the prisms were placed together, photons fired at one edge passed straight through them, as expected. After they were moved apart, most of the photons reflected off the first prism they encountered and were picked up by a detector. But, and here is the amazing part, a few photons appeared to "tunnel" through the gap separating them as if the prisms were still held together. Stranger still, is that these photons had travelled a much longer distance, and yet, they seem to have arrived at their detector at exactly the same time as the reflected photons! If photons all travel at the same speed, and they made a journey that was longer than what was taken by the other photons, and yet turned up at the finishing end at the same time, can only indicate that these photons travelled faster-than-light. Now, this begs the same question for information. Einstein, as we are all aware, was highly critical of quantum mechanics. He was very displeased with the course it was inexorably taking. In response to his dislike, Einstein, Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky set up a thought experiment which has now come to be known as the EPR-Paradox. Their experiment consisted of dealing with a measurment performed on one half of a quantum system. Note however, that this quantum system being measured was actually part of another quantum system, which is now detatched, and left alone. When one half of the system (A) is measured should instantly effect the other half of the system (B) at the very instant of measurement, even though there is no longer any connection between parts A and parts B. One can apply these systems as photons, and if the two photons are created from a single source, then any measurement made on one photon will instantly determine the state of the other photon, even if they are billions of light years apart. Einstein dismissed such long-distance communication as ''spooky,'' but a talented Irish physicist called John Bell mathematically proved that ''entanglement'' as it was coined, could be observed in the lab. Then in 1996 Alain Aspect and collegues solved the EPR-Paradox, and witnessed for the first time quantum entanglement. But this is very strange. If a measured photon at x distance can instantly determine another photon, then this must suggest that information must travel at superluminal speeds. The only other answer came from physicist David Bohm, suggesting that the results where of a local result in the system called ''hidden variables.'' But we must consider superluminal speeds... not just for quantum entanglement, but also for other applications concerning physics. One of these stems from the theory that the past and the future form the present. John G. Cramer introduced this idea, suggesting that quantum information comes from the past and from the future, and multiply in the present, creating a collapse in the wave function. To be fair, he never involved information to travel faster-than-light, but this idea seems to have caught on. I also think information moves v>c. I am very convinced, as i also believe it has profound relationships to quantum consciousness. Might it be that Einstein was wrong again about quantum theory? :shrug: Reiku :m:
