Deepak, Ramtha, Paula and The Universe -- Deep Thots For T-Shirts

 "Conservation of Information" is a principle of physics in which "information" (roughly defined as "that which resolves uncertainty about the state of a physical system at a given moment in time") can never be created or destroyed. The total amount of information in the universe has existed from the beginning of time and will continue till the end, neither increasing or decreasing, and that information is sufficient to describe the universe's entire existence.

Therefore, complete knowledge of a particle's information at a given instant means that all states of the particle from the beginning of time till the end can be described, and without too much effort can be seen to apply to macro objects — indeed, the entire universe — as well. In fact complete knowledge of the information about a single particle holds the entire history of the universe, past, present, and future, presuming that the beginning of it all was a singularity. If so, that means that literally every particle is inextricably bound to and affecting every other particle in the universe, which means that full information concerning that particle necessarily describes the information related to all other particles.

And no, Deepak Chopra can't use it for anything because even though the word "quantum" falls out of his curry-pit about 30 times per day, it would require data storage the size of the universe to contain the information. Deepak, et al can barely retain enough information to fleece their mouth-breathing new-age adherents, which ain't exactly rocket science. I suspect if they could pack all that into their heads, the illumination would be to discover that they're lucky they're so full of shit and so terribly wrong because an enlightened universe that wasn't running on chaotic raw physics would instantly smack 'em in the head and feed them to something useful.

New Age Thought Elevating Another True Believer

Where was I?  Right…

This also may all be bullshit.

(a) I may have made it up, and unless you happen to have a more than passing grasp on this sort of thing, you'd never know it (the Deepak principle); and,

(b) even assuming I didn't make it up, it seems possible that information can, in fact, be lost after all in black holes which are thought to drop stuff out of our universe altogether, which is a no-kidding violation of a core principle of How Shit Works.

Now, be warned that the basis of this wad of deterministic physics is buried in theoretical arcana that's near-chin-deep even for people who work with it for a living. The version presented here is a pre-K level crayon scrawl made by a very stupid toddler trying to draw a sunrise. The whole thing (information theory, not the stupid toddler, although technically he does, too) is an outcome of trying to merge state-symmetry quantum physics with gravity, which doesn't lend itself to quantum anything which results in conflicts like this and which makes physicists cry like little girls about how unfair it all is.  

Long story.

But that black hole thing may ALSO be bullshit. Hawking radiation, wherein wave/particles (and therefore information) quantum-tunnel back across the event horizon of black holes into the "real" universe is a thing. This is why black holes will (probably) evaporate eventually and the micro-black holes that CERN's Large Hadron Collider or whoever might make are (probably) utterly harmless.

In any case, this may well mean that black holes don't remove/change the total amount of information in the universe over the long run after all. So the "conservation of information" crew may have been singing the blues for no reason at all, even though no one is really any closer to sorting out why gravity continues to be a stick in the spokes of quantum physics in general.

(shrug) Working on this sort of esoterica keeps 'em busy, often accidentally produces magic-show stuff that's useful, and has the side effect of reducing the number of them working on horrible shit that will kill us all because they just got curious whether they could do it, so it's all good.

Now, the reason you had to hack through all this (and you did, didn't you?) was a question Paula asked. 

Yes, it's her fault, so I don't want to hear it.

It had to do with privacy, which got me to thinking about the multiple gigabytes (probable terabytes, in fact) of my life bound and frozen in the amber of one-way encryption. Everyone who knows me know that if I wake up dead some morning, they'd as well use my electronics as a door-stops because they're never getting past the whole-disk and/or chip-level encryption, and further understand that they have no idea what online accounts and information storage I have and, even assuming they know of any, would never get anything out of them but enormous blocks of encrypted garbage.

They have enough information to get the data they need (bank accounts, insurance, all that noise), but everything else leaves with me. And that doesn't even speak to the "Tears in the rain" personal experiences that will never be recovered. 

So, when I die and all that information goes with me, does that mean I'm performing the same function as a black hole, permanently removing information from the universe?

This struck me as funny (don't even start with me about my sense of humor -- I know), and I was in the process of designing an obscurely insulting t-shirt with the word "quantum" prominently displayed alongside a vaguely obscene implication based on the concept which I could have sold for big money at Deepak or Ramtha comedy-club acts because their dumb-ass followers would have taken it seriously and would have worn it to their next hive meeting. I probably could've even gotten Oprah's fat ass into one. 

But I suddenly realized I know better. As seen above, even black holes (probably) don't really destroy information. All I've done is randomize it past human recovery and even that only because of their apparently irreversible one-way slog through time, which is entropy-related, which is 2nd Law of Thermodynamics territory.

Nothing special there — as far as we can tell, the entire universe runs on it. And this means I for sure ain't a black hole.

Dammit. So, anyhow, now I'm sad. It would have been a great t-shirt.

And what have YOU been thinking about in your spare time?