 |
As part of our 3rd year work, we've to do a presentation on philosophy and physics — a topic which
has been assumed to be related to our dissertations. One of us intends to write about space, another
on black holes and another is on quantum logic. Any ideas about how we could bring these three
topics together for a presentation? We're thinking about things such as time travel and parallel/
possible worlds, and how far we are capable of travelling through space. Perception will also be
related.
|
|
What a fascinating issue! You know, I assume, about the information-theoretic analysis of black
holes, right? And that because of Hawking radiation they're supposedly losing information? Now,
surely, the relationship between black holes and space is pretty clear (warping, gravity waves, etc.)...
was it Wigner who was theorizing about physics and information theory? Quantum logic is also
interesting, in the context of black holes... what about a black hole being a single quantum state (or
very few)? Then we might be able to use them to do quantum computation. What if the information
being lost relates to that, in some way? Unfortunately, Hawking radiation makes very small black
holes extremely unstable, so they probably aren't good for pocket computers... If you want to go the
whole route, there are the old Gordon Dickson novels involving instantaneous space travel through
controlled use of the uncertainty principle, but I don't think this is very workable, really. However,
there are experiments now being done relating to the indefinite storage of information in quantum
states (see the articles on the arresting of light — which really involves storing information about the
light, not arresting it).
|
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
