If information doesn’t disappear, what happens to it when it’s carrier stops existing? For example, the hard drive is disintegrated or a brain decomposed. Does it return to being energy? If so, doesn’t it mean that it disappeared?
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It means that if you were to analyse absolutely everything left over, with perfect tools, and an inconceivably powerful supercomputer, it would *technically* be possible to reconstruct the destroyed hard drive or the decomposed brain.
You’d need to do things like gather every bit of light that touched the disintegrating hard drive, or every atom that went from the decmposing brain into the ecosystem, so it’s not *practically* possible; but physicists often care about things that aren’t practical because they’re interesting and/or because engineers have a habit of turning a physicist’s “this is cool but it’ll never matter” into new, previously impossible, technological innovations.
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