quantum mechanics / fractal olographic Universe

The Information.

There are many scientists who suspect that the concept of «information» can be fundamental to making further progress in physics. First of all, what is information? The word «information» is used in the current language with a variety of different meanings, and this is a source of confusion even in its scientific use.
The scientific notion of information was clarified by Claude Shannon, mathematician and engineer, in 1948 and is something very simple: information is a measure of the number of possible alternatives for something. For example, if I roll a die, it can fall on 6 faces, so I have a lot of information N=6, because six were the possible alternatives. Instead of the number of alternatives N, binary logarithms (base 2) are used to indicate information, especially in computational complexity analysis, code theory and signal theory so the Shannon information is S= log2 N where N is the number of alternatives.
For S=1 which corresponds to N=2 I have the minimum unit of measure which corresponds to only two possibilities that is the minimum alternative and is called «bit». Two bits of information correspond to four alternatives, three bits to eight alternatives, etc. The subtle point is that information does not measure what I know, but the number of possible alternatives in a Universe where reality is given by the probability that events happen in relation to others, related to other events. Shannon , who invented the theory of information, worked in a telephone company, and was trying to measure how much a telephone line could «carry». What «brings» a telephone line? Information, ability to distinguish between alternatives in function for example of the «quality of the conversation». The notion of information is useful because it measures the ability of physical systems to communicate with each other.

The material is granular.

Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist of the second half of the 20th century, writes at the beginning of his introductory lessons in physics: If in some cataclysm all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence could be transmitted for future generations, what statement could contain the most information in the least number of words? I think that’s the assumption that all things are made of atoms. In this sentence is concentrated a huge amount of information about the world, if only then we use a little imagination and thought.

R.FEYNMAN, The physics of Feynman, tr. it. Zanichelli, Bologna 1990, Book I, chapter 1.

Imagine a world formed by an endless sea of atoms that bounce, attract, cling. Democritus of Abdera, who lived between 470 and 457 B.C. - between 360 and 350 B.C., among the founders of «Atomism» says that when atoms combine, what matters is their shape, their arrangement in structure, and the way they combine. The way atoms are arranged can be related to the way other atoms are arranged. Thus, a set of atoms can have information, in the technical and precise sense described above, about another set.
This, in the physical world, happens continuously and everywhere, every moment and every where: the light that comes to our eyes brings information about the objects from which it comes, the color of the sea has information about the color of the sky above it, a cell has information about the virus that attacked it, a new living being has information because it is related to its parents and with its species, the shape of a leaf says a lot about the biological structure that composes it, as the shape of a snowflake reflects its crystalline structure and you dear reader and observer as you read this preamble and look at my photographs receive information about what I’m thinking as I write, about how to interpret the world I saw.
What happens in the atoms of your brain is no longer entirely independent of what happens in the atoms of my brain. The world is therefore not just a network of colliding atoms: it is also a network of correlations between sets of atoms, a network of reciprocal information between physical systems. In all this there is nothing idealistic or spiritual; It’s just an application of Shannon’s idea that alternatives can be counted.