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Comment by antimagic | Hacker News Reader

I always find it fascinating at just how much of our fundamental physics ends up being constraints on information movement. The laws of thermodynamics are about entropy, general relativity puts constraints on the movement of information (for example, Spooky Action as a Distance(tm) is faster than light, but you can't transmit information with it), the Uncertainty Principle puts limits on how much information you can have on a given system.

Information information everywhere you look in fundamental physics. It does make me wonder why.

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You can reconstruct every mathematical theory as information flow and restrictions. That's a property of mathematics (Turing found that), not physics.

I'm fascinated by such things also. I often can't help thinking of God as a programmer, though I don't know how much of that is confirmation bias of my priors as a theist and a programmer. But I've always thought the periodic table and DNA both felt a lot like code...

The masons thought about God as the great builder, I believe generally we make gods in our own image.

As do the high-level masons.

Physical constants look alot Like magic knobs defined in some header file.

I think it isn't a coincidence that there is so much order and elegance behind the building blocks of our physical world and the universe but the result is chaotic, and unpredictable.

Maybe it's just our brain discovering patterns that don't mean anything.

It's hard to imagine a universe with infinite resolution. You'd effectively have an infinite number of bits in an infinitely dense space, which would potentially require infinite energy to flip.

But I suspect (on no basis whatsoever, except the fact that all previous metaphors have been wrong) that the "universe = Turing machine model" is wrong in some fundamental ways.

I have no idea what the universe is, but I'm open to the possibility that it isn't just an information processing system.

Quantum loop gravity theory suggests a resolution of 1.61619926 × 10^-35 meters, the Planck length.

Agreed, it just feels inadequate to me, too. Information theory is a hammer ... and now everything we can think of (~ information...) looks like a nail.

Another hint that maybe the big Turing machine isn't quite cutting it might be the experiments showing that gravity isn't quite like 'just' an entropic force but seems to behave genuinely different.

Pretty much, but consider the alternative - hypothetically infinite universes, inifitely divisible particles, turtles upon turtles...

Because you need information exchange on the fundamental level to get an arrow of time on the macro level.

Sharding. =)

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