I absolutely loved the way you think and the way you put your ideas into words. Reading your essays is one of those rare experiences where you keep nodding along, thinking, "Exactly!"
At one point, I even thought, "Maybe I married the wrong woman..." 😄
Of course, I mean that in the most innocent and complimentary sense possible. What I really mean is that your intellectual curiosity, clarity, and way of connecting ideas are genuinely captivating. It's refreshing to find writing that makes you stop, think, and smile at the same time.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Looking forward to reading the next one.
I heard a football coach say that he could teach an athlete how to run, but not how to move. This post is a graceful movement through information theory. I’m sure that it took a lot of work to write it, but it reads like it was effortless. Grant Sanderson just started a series on Entropy. Your post should be required reading before watching it. It provides the motivation and perspective needed to bring information theory to life. My interest is in living systems. I’ve been teaching myself information theory and information geometry and your post just pulled many concepts together for me. I hope that you’ll keep writing about information theory. You clearly have a knack for moving through the subject “noiselessly “. Thank you!
Fascinating, thank you for the references. I'd suggest also a book by Shannon's collegue John R. Pierce: An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals snd Noise.
I do love profound puzzles. Usually they are resolved by a neat trick. Let me give an example.
Two qubits are entangled in a superposition that respects a conservation law. If a spin-0 nucleus decays, its daughter particles will have either spin up or spin down. The total momentum sums to zero, satisfying conservation laws. We don’t know whether a particle is spin up or spin down until a measurement is made, and we cannot determine who measures first.
If I measure spin up (1), then I know you measure spin down (0). I can send a message saying 1 (true), indicating the first bit, your 0, is true. If your next measured bit is 1 and my subsequent message bit is 0, then I send false.
In this scenario, no information travels faster than light because a random sequence of bits isn’t information; however, it acts as a shared, perfectly random encryption key.
Here’s the interesting bit. Quantum dots are like macroscopic atoms that can be entangled and exist in a superposition of ground states.
In physics, if I know the energy, I know the total momentum: E = P^2/2 m, which applies in quantum mechanics. The atom’s ground state is at the first energy level, n=1, where two electrons sharing an orbital can be in spin up or spin down.
Suppose these dots can remain in superposition indefinitely. If I take an Avogadro's number of them to Mars and their electrons are held in different atom pairs on Earth, then there’s a 50/50 chance any measured particle is spin up or spin down. and sometimes, both particles are spin-up on Mars, and one then decays into spin-down, emitting radiation, this is spin-flip decay. If I observe a pulse every second of such decay, I call it a 1. If I see no pulse in a second, I call it a zero. We agree on this beforehand. I’m passively observing the aggregate rather than directly measuring.
Is this spin-flip decay possible? Would it be sending information faster than the speed of light, since energy is involved in emitting radiation? Where does the energy for this decay come from? Is the energy teleported from one side to the other?
The question is whether entropy defines time and information, or whether light synchronizes clocks and carries the information as energy?
You are on the right path, although it is probably not possible to send information at FTL speed unless wormholes can be synthesized somehow. You might want to look at matter waves which have a phase velocity faster than light not as information carriers but as a synchronizer for a distant phase locked loop (PLL) with an entangled counterpart. In a locked condition a lower energy state is achieved.
Hi Terezija,
I absolutely loved the way you think and the way you put your ideas into words. Reading your essays is one of those rare experiences where you keep nodding along, thinking, "Exactly!"
At one point, I even thought, "Maybe I married the wrong woman..." 😄
Of course, I mean that in the most innocent and complimentary sense possible. What I really mean is that your intellectual curiosity, clarity, and way of connecting ideas are genuinely captivating. It's refreshing to find writing that makes you stop, think, and smile at the same time.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Looking forward to reading the next one.
Hi Ronny, thank you so much for the praises, I really appreciate it!
Very informative! Thank you for the interesting and information-filled essay. Keep it up!
Thank you Tom, I appreciate your feedback.
I heard a football coach say that he could teach an athlete how to run, but not how to move. This post is a graceful movement through information theory. I’m sure that it took a lot of work to write it, but it reads like it was effortless. Grant Sanderson just started a series on Entropy. Your post should be required reading before watching it. It provides the motivation and perspective needed to bring information theory to life. My interest is in living systems. I’ve been teaching myself information theory and information geometry and your post just pulled many concepts together for me. I hope that you’ll keep writing about information theory. You clearly have a knack for moving through the subject “noiselessly “. Thank you!
Fascinating, thank you for the references. I'd suggest also a book by Shannon's collegue John R. Pierce: An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals snd Noise.
I do love profound puzzles. Usually they are resolved by a neat trick. Let me give an example.
Two qubits are entangled in a superposition that respects a conservation law. If a spin-0 nucleus decays, its daughter particles will have either spin up or spin down. The total momentum sums to zero, satisfying conservation laws. We don’t know whether a particle is spin up or spin down until a measurement is made, and we cannot determine who measures first.
If I measure spin up (1), then I know you measure spin down (0). I can send a message saying 1 (true), indicating the first bit, your 0, is true. If your next measured bit is 1 and my subsequent message bit is 0, then I send false.
In this scenario, no information travels faster than light because a random sequence of bits isn’t information; however, it acts as a shared, perfectly random encryption key.
Here’s the interesting bit. Quantum dots are like macroscopic atoms that can be entangled and exist in a superposition of ground states.
In physics, if I know the energy, I know the total momentum: E = P^2/2 m, which applies in quantum mechanics. The atom’s ground state is at the first energy level, n=1, where two electrons sharing an orbital can be in spin up or spin down.
Suppose these dots can remain in superposition indefinitely. If I take an Avogadro's number of them to Mars and their electrons are held in different atom pairs on Earth, then there’s a 50/50 chance any measured particle is spin up or spin down. and sometimes, both particles are spin-up on Mars, and one then decays into spin-down, emitting radiation, this is spin-flip decay. If I observe a pulse every second of such decay, I call it a 1. If I see no pulse in a second, I call it a zero. We agree on this beforehand. I’m passively observing the aggregate rather than directly measuring.
Is this spin-flip decay possible? Would it be sending information faster than the speed of light, since energy is involved in emitting radiation? Where does the energy for this decay come from? Is the energy teleported from one side to the other?
The question is whether entropy defines time and information, or whether light synchronizes clocks and carries the information as energy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_velocity
You are on the right path, although it is probably not possible to send information at FTL speed unless wormholes can be synthesized somehow. You might want to look at matter waves which have a phase velocity faster than light not as information carriers but as a synchronizer for a distant phase locked loop (PLL) with an entangled counterpart. In a locked condition a lower energy state is achieved.