“To summarize: these things sit on uranium, drink bleach and eat solid rock”.

Link

Geneticist, Steve Jones interviewed in 1994 during the controversy over the book, The Bell Curve.

Something that is very relevant today, given that one of the most famous living scientists claimed that black people were less intelligent.

(as an aside - I’ve finally figured out how to embed videos so that they start at a specific timecode point - do a view source on the video linked to here, if you want to now how.)

Steve Jones Interview - (in light of the Watson controversy) | smashing telly - the best full length free tv programs on the web, updated every day

Wojciech Zurek is onto something wonderful.

My dad is a physicist and runs and Internet startup. Since I am over 40 myself, this is fairly unusual. It also means that when we don’t talk about physics, we talk about computers. For the last couple of years this has amounted to pretty much the same thing, since I have become immersed in the voguish idea that physics and information theory are essentially the same thing.

My hobbyist hunch is that information is relative (being measured in bit pairs) and that it doesn’t flow so much as sync. I believe that the interpretation problems we have explaining the experimental results at the extremes of physics magnify the effects of us trying to explain the inevitable information syncing within system that we are part of by looking near the scale of the entire system or its individual bits, where the definition of the system itself or the bits themselves as something that exists outside of purely our relationship to it/them gets in the way

My second hunch is that the pattern of this inevitable trend towards information syncing (when you communicate you eliminate difference) has another name - Darwinism, and the meta-rule of life - Darwinism, seems much more fundamental than its qualitative use to describe things that poop.

Darwinism is simply the law of efficient elimination of difference, that drives the laws of physics. A true meta-physics that has nothing to do with spirituality and can be expressed quantitatively. I would put my money on the idea that the eventual constant that cancels out the multitude of physical constants will be a ‘D’ in an equation - or perhaps more likely, an algorithm of - Darwinism.

There are a few scientists that are currently most exciting in this area of info-physics/biology/chemistry, such as Lee Smolin and Stuart Kauffman, but Wojciech Zurek seems particularly close to a breakthrough in understanding.

In July he produced a paper that tickles my hunches, (although I have a further hunch that even his ‘relativistic’ view of information is not relativistic enough - that the ‘environment’ that he allows us to use as an indirect witness of some kind of branching quantum lightning bolt, in universal space - simply does not exist. The environment is information’s ether).

That paper, linked to here, is much more technical than my paltry understanding of physics - but I found it somewhat life-changing, so don’t be put off. It is written in the language of physics which is different from everyday English, and it also uses the excessive 3rd person language of technical papers, but it is much easier than it looks to get something out of as a non scientist, if you read it carefully, since, like all great ideas it is itself, elegantly simple.

Relative States and the Environment Einselection, Envariance, Quantum Darwinism, and the Existential Interpretation.

How big is a photon?

When information is readily available, as it is with an Internet connection, finding it through means such as a search engine can often be about asking the right question.

How big is a photon, ends up being one of those rabbit hole questions that causes a computer screen to fill up with scads of information and no real answer.

Its a nice little info bomb to prove how inadequate the standard interpretations of physics’ amazingly accurate Standard Model are. Have a read of some of the answers below:

How big is a photon and what does it look and behave like?

Nice simple explanation of Shannon Entropy.

Information, Uncertainty and Shannon Entropy - The Math Introduction at Nonoscience

The phrase ‘Information Entropy’ is one of the most confusing in science, since entropy is the lack of infomation. But the problem is not with the idea of equating information theory and entropy, just eth sloppy phrasing. Information Entropy means Entropy within the concept of information science (as opposed to thermodynamics, for example).

Make the electrodes in an ion trap cold and you can stop qubit decoherence.

science, engineering & technology news

New Yorker article on Lee Smolin’s visceral attack on string theory.

‘The paradoxical situation of string theory

Kathy Young for Capital News 9:

“By the end of the week, the universe could be expanding, with the addition of three new planets to our solar system.”

Hilarious. Given the relative size of the known Universe to our solar system, this is the equivalent of saying: “By the end of the week, the earth could be expanding, with the addition of three grains of sand on a beach in Florida.”

Capital News 9 | 24 Hour Local News | HEADLINES | A cosmic change

A quarter of everything that exists has just been found.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Team finds ‘proof’ of dark matter

Thermodynamic entropy vs information entropy - Advanced Physics Forums

“We can choose to look at thermodynamic entropy in two different ways. One approach would say that a high entropy state is information poor because there is so much disorder, and the disorder is essentially random. The other approach would say that a high entropy state is information rich because to truly describe the exact state of randomness in all its gory detail would require lots of information.”

This outlines the confusion of the difference in the ’sign’ between Shannon and Boltzmann entropy.
It is basically a confusion over the difference between a state which has meaning to a particular observer, and the notion of absolute meaning where bits of information are stored in the smallest possible moving (hence thermodynamic) particles. What if the latter case were subjective?

There is possibly no such thing as absolute entropy, or energy or information for that matter, merely the capacity to interact with a decoder or remote system. This is possibly explained in terms of entropy by comparing microstates to macrostates (think numbered balls vs a bunch of similar marbles).

(Sorry for the slightly random rant - I’m using this blog for public notes about entropy, in case anyone else is interested in this stuff)