Fred56

Arcangelo Rossi Dipartimento di Fisica, Universit` di Lecce, Via Arnesano, I-73100 Lecce, Italy It's probably something we don't think about, but photons have energy. Information, ultimately, is also energy, or uses it to "carry" a message. You can look at it from the entropy angle too, but it's a bit harder to get.

The brain is capable of recursion, regression in upon itself, a re-entrant bootstrapping routine that loads another level of something we term “objectivity”, we "map" this to itself. We objectivise the world by projecting a memory, an image of some part of the external into our internal information "store". Although we don't well understand how our biochemical brains actually do this, we do understand information, and how it behaves.

Complexity, chaos theory, emergence and informatics are all disciplines of ergodics, or intersections, at least. Complex systems (like our planet, the internet, just about anything complicated) are a big deal right now.

Electrons, being fundamental particles, have spin and wavelength. They are “matter waves”. We know that things, objects, can move “left” and then “right”, and we know they can't or don't move “left and right”. This seems some impossible trick this humble particle that has brightened our lives for a century, blithely does despite our insistence. Why do these “quantised” entities jump through such implausible quantum hoops? What are they doing that we don't or can't (perhaps ever) see?

Another important point is that entropy still only goes one way. Life can slow the rate at which entropy increases, but it can't stop it. The viral "organism" seems to fall somewhere outside my generalised conjecture. Viruses don't carry much of an energy store around but rather seem to be a thing that co-opts something that has one (a bacteria or cell) to its own ends. It's a bit of a tough one, that. I think, for the time, that viruses and any other "replicatively" functioning forms (non energy-storing) should be left outside the set. My opine, but.

Quantum information isn't massless...

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Perhaps everyone is forgetting about something called equilibrium, quod vide(cough).

Right. But you're splitting hairs. I'm saying he didn't (initially) you're saying he did (eventually) you ning.

Really?? With just equal/not equal? Like binary. I guess because we came with 10 things on the things at the end of those longer things, we ended up with base10. Numbers and number theory probably evolved once base10, at least, was used. There are still people (remote tribes) who don't count beyond three things, they have "more than" three, though.

Well, I do say ("at its simplest remove"). I'm "modeling" it. It's a thing that stores energy. Sure it does a whole lot more stuff (replication,stimulus-response,trophication,...). This is "an introductory course to Life101".

OK, the expansion might not be "due" to entropy. That's a bit of a leap right there. But saying time is a vector on the surface (of entropy/expansion) is ok, no? (I say entropy is on the "surface" of the expansion, above) The expansion and the fact the universe may have no (Euclidean) boundary are related. This is my conjecture.

Which bit are you disagreeing with?

Farsight: Maybe you should try an experimental course (of action). Can you get any cheap gear to do some EMR stuff, interference, scattering?

Consciousness is one of those properties the "emergists" talk about emerging from the brain.

Perhaps it: I wonder how it manages to do this?

The idea of increase and decrease leads to numbers and counting. Numbers lead to the idea of combination, of function within measure. Functions lead to “functions within functions”, and there is a projection, in both directions. Number maps to function, function maps to function within function (combination, transitivity, commutation), and on up the chain. Math is like a big chain. Where do numbers come from? We all understand “less”, “more”, and “same”, in terms of measurement. At first, human measurement of the environment was probably largely restricted to these ideas of (available) information. Gradually, a need would have developed to record information in ways other than storing it internally, and so language and the concept of oral records would have arisen, alongside the first use of other symbols and devices to “remember” something. Then as these systems extended, the concept of counting beyond the three basic "cocepts" (less, equal, more) -and after introducing symbol and language records, would have produced ways of measuring the environment that became more useful. Once the idea that measurement (less or more), could be represented (in markings, in language) by something; could be abstracted, Mathematics was born.

Right, we know all that. Hawking is saying that he "fudged" his theory. Which is different to explaining the problem with it. He didn't really change his mind until Hubble's observation. So he did "miss the opportunity" to predict it (expansion). Fixing up a theory after the fact to bring it into line with empirical observation isn't quite the same thing. Remember?

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“Putting a disconnected world together by explaining it in terms of effects and causes may be as natural to us as breathing. If the world does not provide coherent information, the mind is apt to impose its own coherence on the world, with an abundance of explanations.” -Jeremy Campbell, The Improbable Machine Spyman: why do you think he initially used such a small value (for his constant)?

Found a pretty nice EMR chart (nowhere else to put it): http://www.lot-oriel.com/site/site_down/cc_light_deen01.pdf Just for good measure, what a Mr Fradkin thinks we should be looking for: http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/qubit_c06/fradkin/pdf/Fradkin1_KITP.pdf

If you had a good enough microscope you could keep track of the ecosystem in a drop of water. With something like a pond, there's more work. But you could try something small and easy to observe (maybe an ant farm or something). Is it meant to be portable?

How long ago did a certain procedural "fault" occur with those decommissioned nukes? I was just wondering how many Americans have been dreaming about a nuclear weapon poised over the US? Or this this too OTT?

Life at its simplest remove is essentially the storage of energy. This storing (a process) does not come free; Life has to use energy to store energy. This extra comes from the environment. Life is an ongoing balance between using stored energy to find more of it, but there's no free lunch.

Probably. This is a "photographic" memory of the article in NS.