Information, Ghostly Apparitions And Dinosaurs
I was just mulling over Information Theory and how I recall reading that information can't be destroyed.
It got me wondering about how light reflects off of objects and this reflected light, according to optics, lands on our retinas and we, well, see the world around us.
Assuming the specific patterns of lightwaves/photons that constitute visual images are information then, if information can't be destroyed, all the images that light from a source has ever produced must still exist at this very moment.
Is it possible then that visual reports of ghosts - a person seeing an apparition - are simply indestructible visual image information being sensed by people? I mean if the pattern of photons my late grandfather consisted of, thoroughly mixed by now with other photon patterns of other people and various objects, were to fall on my retina, I would actually see my late grandfather again! :chin: In medieval terms I would see my late grandfather's ghost.
Other information patterns of matter-energy may also persist and, in my humble opinion, may account for so-called paranormal phenomena.
Tapping into this kind of information source we could, in theory, see the entire history of the earth - dinosaurs and all. The Loch Ness monster maybe an instance of people seeing such reconstituted prehistoric information?
It got me wondering about how light reflects off of objects and this reflected light, according to optics, lands on our retinas and we, well, see the world around us.
Assuming the specific patterns of lightwaves/photons that constitute visual images are information then, if information can't be destroyed, all the images that light from a source has ever produced must still exist at this very moment.
Is it possible then that visual reports of ghosts - a person seeing an apparition - are simply indestructible visual image information being sensed by people? I mean if the pattern of photons my late grandfather consisted of, thoroughly mixed by now with other photon patterns of other people and various objects, were to fall on my retina, I would actually see my late grandfather again! :chin: In medieval terms I would see my late grandfather's ghost.
Other information patterns of matter-energy may also persist and, in my humble opinion, may account for so-called paranormal phenomena.
Tapping into this kind of information source we could, in theory, see the entire history of the earth - dinosaurs and all. The Loch Ness monster maybe an instance of people seeing such reconstituted prehistoric information?
Comments (11)
Energy and informational are quite closely related (and are in effect the modern equivalents of substance and form). Heat energy is essentially the same as informational noise: it is just disorder. “Noisy” arrangements of energy are all that heat is.
The second law, in its deeper statistical form, basically says that the information of the universe gets noisier, more disordered, over time; it losing usable energy to heat is just a byproduct of that, since heat is noisy energy. And just as it is hard to extract useful information from a noisy source, so too is it consequently difficult to extract usable energy from heat.
The upshot here being that although the information is not destroyed, it is still lost, inaccessible, through the passage of time, just like usable energy gets lost to useless heat over time.
As I recall, information can be destroyed in a black hole.
The hawking radiation conjecture doesn't prove it.
Yes, there's entropy and the photon pattern of historic objects may subsequently be affected by it and that, for me, explains why most ghosts seen by people are hazy/blurry/shadowy images, an indication that some information was "lost" (to entropy or something else).
Odds comparable to a dropped and broken egg un-dropping itself into an intact egg again.