X-Message-Number: 20905 From: "michaelprice" <> References: <> Subject: Re: information conservation again Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2003 08:15:08 -0000 Bob Ettinger mentions the "multiverse". Making the distinction between the Multiverse and our Universe enables us clarify the role of information and its loss from the universe. The multiverse (or universal wavefunction in technotalk) is the collection of all the ways the universe could have turned out, rather than just the way it appears to turned out in our universe. Some physicists (who follow Everett) believe the multiverse to actually exist; for them & me the universe is part of a greater reality. Others believe the multiverse is just a theoretical construct; for them the multiverse represents the entire range of possible universes, of which only our universe, with its unique history, is real. For the purposes of our discussion it doesn't matter whether we treat the multiverse as real or not. According to physics every time a random event occurs information is lost from our universe into the multiverse (or simply lost if we don't believe in the multiverse). The laws relating to information conservation (technobabble: unitarity) apply only to the multiverse, not to the universe. This is true whether or not we believe the multiverse to be real or not. Therefore information is not conserved in our universe; it is diluted away every time a random event occurs. This perspective also addresses Mike Perry's point about information loss at black holes. Information that falls into a black holes is eventually (by the consensus view) spewed out again in the Hawking radiation, but across all the range of universes that have diverged since the infalling, so that the amount of information that re-emerges in any one universe is quite negligible and, consequently, indistinguishable from the background thermal spectrum emitted. To reconstruct someone lost in the mists of history we would need access to information that has been scattered across the multiverse. Our universe alone would not possess the information. And since, according to current physics, the information lost to other, inaccessible universes in the multiverse is lost for ever, such reconstruction or resurrection of past individuals is impossible. Cheers, Michael C Price ---------------------------------------- http://mcp.longevity-report.com http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=20905