| Manu | Date: Sunday, 07-November-2021, 4:14 PM | Message # 1 |
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| If the universe is a giant computer simulation, here's how many bits would be required to run it
By Adam Mann 3 days ago
How many bits does the universe contain? A lot.
The visible cosmos may contain roughly 6 x 10^80 — or 600 million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion — bits of information, according to a new estimate.
The findings could have implications for the speculative possibility that the universe is actually a gigantic computer simulation.
Underlying the mind-boggling number is an even stranger hypothesis. Six decades ago, German-American physicist Rolf Landauer proposed a type of equivalence between information and energy, since erasing a digital bit in a computer produces a tiny amount of heat, which is a form of energy.
Because of Albert Einstein's famous equation E = mc^2, which says that energy and matter are different forms of one another, Melvin Vopson, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth in England, previously conjectured that a relationship might exist between information, energy and mass.
"Using the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, I speculated that information could be a dominant form of matter in the universe," he told Live Science. Information might even account for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up the vast majority of matter in the cosmos, he added.
Vopson set out to determine the amount of information in a single subatomic particle, such as a proton or neutron. Such entities can be fully described by three basic characteristics: their mass, charge and spin, he said.
"These properties make elementary particles distinguishable [from] each other, and they could be regarded as 'information,'" he added.
Read more/full article/source - https://www.livescience.com/how-many-bits-in-the-universe
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