Hello,
I have been watching a ton of Youtube videos trying to under exactly what is meant by “information” when used in physics. All the videos they discuss possible means, methods, conceptions of “how, why where” information is.
But, I cannot wrap my head around what exactly information IS?
In: 18
You ever play the game Guess Who? You get to ask a series of yes/no questions to identify one person among 24. On average, the best questions will eliminate half the available characters from 24, to 12, to 6, to 3, to 2, then finally 1. Meaning you should be able to win in 5 questions.
So we would say, then, that this system has 5 bits of information. Information is basically the number of yes/no questions you would need to completely specify all of its properties.
The best eli5 answer I know of is [this](https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/what-is-quantum-information) one.
In a nutshell, in classical physics information is stored in bits, either 0 or 1. But when physicists talk about information they’re almost always talking about quantum information, which is stored in qubits, which behave differently, based on probabilities and being in multiple states at once until the moment of observation.
No, I don’t really understand it, either, but quantum computing and quantum information are the terms you should be googling if you want to understand what physicists are talking about when they say “information.”
Quite a while since you posted, but I’m not sure you have a satisfactory answer yet.
You’ve spotted that we may generally mix up concepts like ‘knowledge’, ‘data’ and ‘information’ in everyday language, but all 3 are distinct.
The reason I highlight that fact is to make the next point clear – information in physics has absolutely nothing to do with us.
For any object or field in the universe, there are a set of properties shared by all objects/fields of that type. We possess knowledge of those properties, but that is not information in this context.
The information is the part that is particular to each instance/location of each property. Those values become data when we measure them, but the information belongs to the thing itself – an objects ‘state’ being the sum of the values each of its properties currently possesses.
Not sure if it will help further, but ‘the information paradox’ has been under discussion since the 70s in astrophysics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox#:~:text=The%20black%20hole%20information%20paradox,quantum%20mechanics%20and%20general%20relativity.
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