Walking into the international transit lounge at Heathrow airport, I was greeted by a startling sight. It was the summer of 2007, and the seventh and last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, had just been released. The transit lounge was mottled with the orange and black book cover, behind which hungry eyes were devouring the last saga of Harry Potter. It sold 15 million copies in the first 24 hours worldwide and then went on to sell 44 million copies.
So, what was it that these readers paid money for? Was it the paper and the ink? Clearly, it was not. What they eagerly stood in line to buy were the ideas that had originated in the mind of a certain JK Rowling. Rowling had become a very wealthy woman with the money that flowed from the book series. It was not just the ideas that people bought, but it was every turn of each word that JK Rowling chose to express those ideas. Essentially, the readers paid for each decision taken by JK Rowling on the choice and order of words. They did not care about the ink and paper – they cared about the information carried on the ink and paper.
Information is a strange and mysterious thing. It is a big part of our lives, yet it is not very well understood. It is hard to define. Our scientific laws do not explain it. Yet, everything from books, to music, to movies is information. The commerce around information is huge; it is more than an industry – it is classified as an economic sector. The sector consists of sub-sectors such as publishing industries (including software publishing); motion picture and sound recording industries; broadcasting industries, including traditional and Internet broadcasting; telecommunications industries including mobile phones; web search portals, data processing industries, and information services industries. (NAICS)
With the arrival of computers, cell phones and smart phones we are immersed in an ocean of information that we have to swim through every day. Yet, if asked to define it, most of us would stumble in trying to define something that is so broad and pervasive. Dictionaries define information by providing alternative words or examples, such as data, knowledge, or a message, but do not actually tell us what it is.
The words we hear from people we talk to everyday is information. Human minds, more than those of any other animal, seem to be well designed to deal with this ephemeral thing called information. We know it when we see it. We know it when we hear it. If we see words scrawled into the wet sand as we are walking along a beach, we immediately pick them out from all the other patterns the waves and wind may have created. When a skywriter creates words in the sky, we can immediately distinguish them from what the winds have done. Our minds seem to have the ability to recognize information at an instinctive, sub-conscious level – seemingly without effort. We also appear to have an ability to create it as well – another innate ability. Language seems to be as old as humanity. From exchanging nods with other people to exchanging notes by email, writing books, painting, creating sculpture and playing music, we can create information and render it in multiple media. Not only do we create information for utility, we create it for pleasure and derive meaning and significance from this act of creation.
Elusive but Real
While pervasive and innate, information has an elusive quality. It is not in the ink and paper. You would not be satisfied if, instead of a book, I offered you the equivalent amount of paper and ink. Nor is information in the glowing pixels on your screen. The same information can appear as paper and ink, or as glowing pixels and we do not see an appreciable difference. It does not seem to be tied to a particular physical medium. The US government website (NAICS) echoes this when, in describing the Information industry, says: “Unlike traditional goods, an ‘information or cultural product' such as a newspaper on-line or television program, does not necessarily have tangible qualities, nor is it necessarily associated with a particular form.” The US government seems to be saying that this large economic sector deals with something that may not be tangible and is not necessarily limited to a single medium.
Even though information is not tangible, we need our senses to detect it. Strictly speaking, our senses do not sense information – our brain does. The senses can sense only things that are material or energy: our senses can detect optical, mechanical, thermal and chemical stimuli. Our eyes can sense light, our ears can sense sound, our skin can detect pressure and temperature, our tongue can distinguish chemicals in our foods and our nose can detect chemicals in what we eat or inhale. All of these sensory inputs are gathered and integrated by the brain into information about the world around us. The brain seems to act like a sensory organ – but for information. It almost seems like an independent sixth sense.
Curiously, information is not tied exclusively to any one of the five senses. We can read with our eyes, we can listen to words with our ears. We can even read with our skin as shown by those who read Braille. When my children were in elementary school, we had a game where they would write words with their finger on my back and I had to guess the word. Amazingly, if they wrote slowly and big enough I would be able to guess the words. Essentially, I was reading with the skin on my back. It was not very efficient, but I was able to read.
Not of this world?
There is a startling aspect to information – it does not seem to be made of matter or energy, yet it seems to have the property of location. If it has location in space and time then it exists in our world – even though it is not matter or energy.
First, we need a thought exercise to better establish the idea that information is not matter or energy. Consider a paper document – say, an important document, like the deed to your house. Assume we smudge the print on the deed to a point where it is completely unreadable by any means. Now the deed ceases to have information and it ceases to be a document. It is just some ink smudges on paper. For want of a better term it is a non-document. As we transformed the document into a non-document, we retained its key physical properties including its weight, its volume and its chemical composition. Essentially, nothing changed physically. Yet, everything changed – it changed dramatically from a document to a non-document. It had information, and then it did not. Instead of declaring that you own the house, it says nothing about the house or the ownership. If that were the only copy, the difference between the document and non-document might be your ownership of the house. What changed? We know it is not matter or energy but whatever changed has to be linked to the information. Whatever did not change is not related to information and can be discounted.
If we look at what did not change, we can conclude that information does not possess mass (weight) or volume. The ink, though smudged, is still present on the paper in the same quantity as before it was smudged. If the mass and volume did not change it means that information is not matter. Matter has mass and volume -- without mass or volume, matter would not be matter. Clearly, mass and volume are essential properties of matter – but not of information.
If information is not matter, then could it be energy? Going back to the thought experiment we can ask what is the difference in energy in the document and in the non-document? Before we smudge the document, the energy in the document consisted of the multiple forms of energy including thermal, chemical, and electrical and nuclear energies. Take for example the thermal energy which represents the energy present in the vibrations of all the molecules in the document. After smudging the ink, it is clear that the thermal energy is not going to change significantly. This means that the information is not energy. If anything, the thermal energy would increase due to the energy of smudging. But it does not tell us that information is made of this energy because this energy was added from the outside during the process of smudging and can be discounted.
Without belaboring the point, this illustration helps us understand that information is not matter or energy. This is consistent with the idea that information can be transmitted and duplicated in a ways not possible with energy or matter.
Even though information is not matter, it seems to possess one key property of matter: location. As an illustration, consider our paper document again. Clearly, the paper document has a location. Maybe it is located in your drawer at home or it is located on the desk or located in your lawyer’s office. The point is that it has a location – it is somewhere, and not elsewhere. An imaginary box can be drawn around it and we can state confidently that it inside that imaginary box. All material things have location – everything that is made of matter or energy has location.
Can we conclude then, that the information borne by the document has a location too? At first, the answer may seem obvious: of course the information has location! It is located where the document is located. While this may seem pretty obvious, it is not clear why it should be so. After all, we know that information is not matter or energy. If so, it is not necessary that information has location because location is a property of matter and energy. Could it be that information only exists in our minds? Perhaps the location is in our heads. Perhaps it does not even exist in the natural world. Perhaps it is just a figment of our imagination.
Again we need a thought exercise to see that information does have location. Consider some pirates of old, who have buried a treasure map on a remote island. Years go by, and all the pirates who were witnesses pass away and soon the treasure map on the island is forgotten to man. Centuries later, a lucky couple vacationing on the remote island finds the treasure map. They decipher the map, locate the treasure and become very rich. Question: what is the location of the information of the treasure map?
Clearly, during the time when it lay undisturbed over the centuries, it was not in any human mind. Those who knew about the map were dead, and those who were alive did not know it existed. The information entered the young couple’s minds only when they came to the location of the treasure map. At that instant, the information that was on the treasure map was now also in their minds. Clearly, the information about the treasure cannot be said to exist only in the mind. We can further assert that the information was located along with the map, buried in the sands of the remote island. Not only does it have location, but also it was not a figment of anyone’s imagination, because there was no one’s imagination for it to be a figment of. The only way to reconcile these observations is to acknowledge that information is real and has location. Or at least, to acknowledge that stored information has location as a property.
We then have to conclude that information is real and exists in our world even though it is not made of matter or energy.
Information and Life
There is another more intriguing fact: information is found in nature and further, it is central to life itself. At the heart of every cell is the amazing DNA molecule which for all intents and purposes is the library of recipes for the proteins in our body. The DNA library is where the cell mechanism turns when it needs a new supply of proteins to sustain life. Life, like information, is very hard to define. We know it when we see it, just like information. Life itself seems to be defined by information – by the organization and design inherent in it.
Paul Davies, in his book The Fifth Miracle discusses the problem of the origin of life and states that that the real problem to be answered is the question of where “biological information came from”. He goes on to state, “I have come to the conclusion that no familiar law of nature could produce such a structure from incoherent chemicals with the inevitability that some scientists assert”. Davies is arguing why it is futile to look to conventional physics and chemistry to explain the origin of DNA molecules – which he calls “impossible objects”.
Information and Matter
Davies’ observation lines up well with the idea that information is not matter or energy. Our scientific laws describe things that are only matter or energy. But we observe that though information is not matter or energy, it is real and has location. So here we have something that is real that we do not, and cannot understand in terms of the scientific laws known to us. So, if information is real, it strongly suggests that our scientific laws do not describe our world fully – only parts of it. The implications of this cannot be ignored. Especially for those endeavors that try to explain the big picture like the Big Bang, the formation of the earth, and the age of the universe.
This thinking is not new. For example, Gregory Chaitin, a mathematician in the nascent field of algorithmic information theory, raises the question “What if information is primary and matter/energy is a secondary phenomenon?” [Chaitin, 1999, The Unknowable] In other words, he is wondering if information somehow under girds the natural world that we observe. The point is that information and matter/energy may be distinct. The latter may not account for the former. Instead matter and energy may be nothing more than information. Everything we see, touch, hear, smell and taste may be information.
This idea may sound utterly incomprehensible. Yet, as our understanding of the atomic world increased over the 20th century, scientists increasingly lost the physical picture of the atom and gained a picture that was full of – numbers. Quantum mechanics, the science of the atomic world, deals with a world that is very unlike our normal-sized world. In quantum mechanics, things seem to come in chunks, or quanta, – including things like energy and charge.
For example, the electron is described as a particle. Yet, the word particle here is not what we think it means in common usage. When we think of a particle, it is a particle made of some material. For example, a dust particle may be small piece of sand or dry skin. In all familiar cases a particle is always a particle of something. However, the electron is not a particle of anything – it is just a “particle” that has set of numbers associated with it. Some of these numbers describe its mass and charge. Others describe it’s relationship to the atom. But that is all we can say about what the electron is – it is just a particle of numbers.
This key point cannot be missed — an electron is nothing else, but numbers! It is not that these numbers describe something – these numbers are all there is. In other words, information is all there is! As the physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer says in his book Information “If the wave function is nothing but a storehouse of information needed to make correct predictions, then the stuff of the world is really, at bottom, information”. Here he is talking about the wavefunction, a mathematical construct, used to describe how the particle and systems of particles change over time.
So, this intangible thing we call information, which we seem to have an innate ability to create and consume – that is not matter or energy, but yet possesses location and is real – is also found in nature and is at the heart of life itself and is what the atomic world seems to be made of. If we better understand this mysterious thing called information, we may be able to draw back the veil on a vast territory as yet unexplored by science to develop a new and deeper understanding of our world, our minds and ultimately who we are as humans.
© 2011 George Valliath
