At the subatomic level, is there any real difference between information and a "thing"? Seems mostly philosophical and arbitrary at that point.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics#Wheeler.27s_.2...
All following quotes are from the documentary "Atomic Physics and Reality" [1 - 'emphasis' mine.].
John Wheeler:
Einstein admired Bohr and Bohr admired Einstein. And you
recall that Einstein felt that 'reality' exists, in effect,
'out there', something independent of us. And the position
of Bohr was rather this: that 'reality' is only a word and
we have to learn what the right way is to use that word.
Bohr, I think, quite in early in life had decided that
ordinary concepts such as space and time simply wouldn't work
at the atomic scale. And it was always a bit unclear what
Bohr would replace those concepts by, if anything. But
Einstein was very attached to the space-time description, and
thought that one should try very hard to extend it into the
atomic domain.
And this was the root of the disagreement between the two men.
Bohr had developed a view in which he essentially would say
that 'reality' was unknown or unknowable, or even had no
meaning, 'reality' by itself. Reality, except at the large
scale level of ordinary experience, atomic reality had no
meaning, and all that we have are 'phenomena', produced in
an 'experiment', and that quantum theory deals with the inter-
relationships of all these phenomena.
Bohr was not a professional philosopher. How much of the
traditional philosophers he read, one does not know. But
he was an extremely intelligent man and he must have thought
through some of the issues that professional philosophers had
thought through very deeply. And certainly one of the issues
that he had though through considerably, with some help I
think from reading, was the Kantian issue of the status of
'the thing in itself'. The 'thing' as it really is, quite
apart from Human 'perception' of it.
Bohr, like Kant, was very suspicious that one can say anything
significant, intelligent, controllable, about 'the thing in
itself'. [Bohr] once said that physics or science in general
was not about 'nature' but about nature exposed to our
'observation'. And that is very Kantian.
I am personally not comfortable with using 'information'. I think Bohm's formulation "phenomena" is more appropriate. Note that, for example, the manifestation of wave/particle duality is an actual physical phenomena. The 'information' bit is our observation of this phenomena.
And in case the question is still on the table as to are these distinctions merely a matter of philosophical taste or aesthetics?, from same source cited:
Alain Aspect
At the time of Einstein and Bohr it was just a theoretical
discussion. You could endorse either Einstein's position or
Bohr's position, and it was just a matter of taste.
And then there was the great discovery by John Bell in '65 that
it is not only a matter of taste, because according to the
position you have at the subatomic point, you have predictions
which are not the same.
If you follow Einstein you have a certain type of predictions
-- that is to say you have results that are in agreement with
what is called the Bell's inequalities -- and if you follow
Bohr's position you have another type of prediction which are
in contradiction, in opposition, with Bell's inequalities.
But yes, I think phenomena are the atomic building blocks of science. The logical positivists at least got that right.
Lacking context, this could seem somewhat opaque.
Would you mind clarifying which definition of "phenomenon" you are intending to convey? (eg Kantian or otherwise)
But being related to reality, it's easy to be confused or rightfully associated with being a thing. I'd say that it's superposition of epistemology and ontology. You can't really separated to knower from the known.
Seems kind of silly to pull apart information as somehow separate or lesser than reality. Saying "real teleportation" is somehow different than "just information" is nonsensical. It's like saying with quantum teleportation that the two particles aren't "really" entangled, they just have the same state. Well if you can't distinguish the state, what distinguishes them? They're literally the same until something distinguishes them.
Or, to put it another way, "just" information teleporting isn't any less exciting. "real" teleportation doesn't hold up to much thought anyway; it's very difficult to ground it in physical terms. Is there much point assuming people think about teleportation that way?
And when you consider the only difference between two particles is the information state they are in. And that you do teleport the information. The name is not misleading.