Fairy Dust in Physics: How Non-Physical Views of Information Impede Theory

Are bits — zeros and ones — limitless fundamental components of spacetime? Or are they configurations of matter and energy that exist only within material systems? Theorists as deeply insightful as John Wheeler and Gerart ’t Hooft view bits as fundamental features of spacetime that need no further explanation. Experimentally, however, bits exist only as states of matter and energy. After all, the instant you probe empty space to see if bits exist there, that space is no longer energy-free.
The nature of bits impacts our use of mathematics to model reality since naïve use of real-number equations generates infinite bits of precision and, thus, infinite numbers of bits. If bits require energy to exist, only a microscopic fraction of these bits can be real.
In this talk, Terry challenges mathematicians and physicists to consider bits as finite energy-based phenomena related to the emergence of classical physics. By eliminating non-existent “fairy dust” bits from existing highly effective theories, bit-sparse interpretations offer theorists a new approach to attacking problems such as the stubborn incompatibility of bit-rich General Relativity with bit-sparse quantum mechanics.
Speaker: Terry Bollinger
Terry Bollinger is a computer scientist with a BS, MS, and Professional Degrees from the Missouri University of Science and Technology. He views physics as a debugging problem in which failures to resolve a problem often indicate not a lack of creative thinking but reliance on a blatantly false assumption in a paper from decades ago. Folks know him best for keeping the US Department of Defense from banning open-source software, which would have seriously undermined national defense and the open-source software industry. He has also helped find and insert new technologies into the federal government and define and obtain federal funding for robotics and AI research.

Moderators: TBD

Host or Publisher Washington DC Quantum Computing Meetup