kurzgesagt has a video about how, according to our understanding of physics, information cannot be destroyed. It’s in this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWO-cvGETRQ
They explained it as that if you have a piece of paper with writing on it, and you burned it, but then you collected every atom that once came from the paper, and measured their every property, you can perfectly recreate the paper and the writing, because apparently the atoms themselves retain the information about the paper. I’m curious about this concept, because to me, this sounds pretty unbelievable, because wouldn’t there be randomness that gets in the way of reconstructing the paper? Wouldn’t the information get lost in the noise at some point, and become too ambiguous or indistinguishable? Does this idea work for everything that can store information? For example, of you have a hard drive, which a file was overwritten, where does that information go? Are they still somehow stored away within the atoms of the hard drive? How would you, in theory, reconstruct it? Same questions with an SSD, if the cells containing electrons that make up the information in an SSD change states as they are overwritten, where does that information go? In the far far future, could forensics teams, in theory, use this principle to recover any data from any computer, regardless of what was done to it?
In: Physics
There may be randomness in the way the paper burned, but when physics says “information”, that includes “the path every atom took and every reaction that happened along the way”. Once you know that, you can do the math backwards to “rewind” to the state the paper was in to begin with.
That’s what physics means by “information”.
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