What is Physical Information? 

This channel is so underrated. I was struggling with this thought as well. Also, you are too funny my friend 😂

Finally science videos made for people with borderline personality disorder.

Your videos are built the way people naturally think. Its impressive

One of my favorite channels on science. Very high quality content!

5:05 is highly instructive, "If we both send a signal at the same time..." good to hear a proper physicist saying it. A 'universal now' is still embedded in our thinking so we ARE allowed to talk about a light pulse 4 light years away being emitted at the same time as ours although of course we can't cause it to happen or even know about it for 4 years. Same as we say distant stars we're currently seeing have probably exploded by 'now' as if there's a universal 'now'. I think there's big confusion in relativity over the concept of reality: an actual event vs the way it appears due to information traveling at the speed of light. Einstein says reality is what you measure, not what you think ought to be, ie they're one and the same thing. It would be great if you could do an in-depth video on the subject of reality.

Among a lot youtube science channels, you did a very interesting look back in physics timeline, particularly information; relating mechanics, relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, all of them related by the concept of information. You should make more videos like this, relating more branches of physics, energy for example is another concept that binds them together. You made physic's history interesting by jumping forward and backward. (y)

Does the morse code at the end mean "hello world"?

I'm pretending I understand all of it, but deep down I'm more confused now that I was before watching this video.

This man should have more subscribers than even pew die pie. Really, his content has very good quality. One of the best science channels in whole of youtube

Nick you r brilliant...👍👍👍👨‍🎨🥁what comes across so well in your videos is commitment to your theories, and your humor ... the mix between the two makes you magic. big fan. Don't stop talking please.

Hey there. Love the channel. Once upon a time I was an evolutionary biologist and my mentor wrote a book about Evolution as Entropy. Could you perhaps do a video explaining this a little better ? Sort of a merging of biology and the 2nd law of thermodynamics? It could be quite valuable to the general community as it is often a bone of contention in debates. Keep up the great work!

Just subscribed to your channel. I love your approach. From the historical stuff to the philosophy and context. But also your enthusiasm and understanding of it. All done with appropriate irreverence

took 6 years for this information to get to me, but I'm happy it finally arrived. subbed.

I just finished studying the concept of entropy of a random variable and opened RU-vid to saw the definition in you video? Great video as usual.

Man u cleared up so many doubts through your videos I absolutely love this guy super fun to be around wish I was like that too!

Fantastic job on this one! Also excellent pronunciation of Huygens. as to your last dea about the physical universe being made up of information (paraphrasing) you should look up Max Tegmark. Normally he writes papers about data processing of radio data (he processed the CMB map) but he has a book and a couple papers which are about the philosophical notion that reality is a particular mathematical construct.

You deserve so many more videos. I love the explanation of speed of light is speed of causality/information. Thanks nick

Another excellent video. This channel is one of the best for real insight and clarity.

Correct me if im wrong, but isn't a high entropy state also a state of high information? As in: you need much information to describe that state. A low entropy state (e.g. all particles are in the upper right corner of a box) needs less information to describe. Ok now that i think of it, i guess you could differentiate between the information We have, and the information thats hidden in the system (that the system has). Low entropy does then mean that we have lots of information, and therefore only a little bit is left hidden in the system. Either way, doesn't seem to me that information is getting lost really, just the information we as observers can have about a system dilutes over time. But the properties of the physical world (its information) only mix up, but don't get lost Anyways, nice videos, keep up the good work, i enjoy it! :)

The historical development of ideas is what is sorely missed from my actual physics lectures. I have sometimes wondered why physics cannot be taught more like a humanities course, where in lecture we look back to the original papers and piece things together...

Damn Those 1 frame pictures tho

1. So if there are things that are traveling faster than the speed of light, will we never know? Because we will not be able to detect the information coming from them? 2. What about Tachyons? CERN says it travels faster than light? How did they measure that? 3. Also, I am having a hard time digesting the fact that the speed of light is same for all observers in all reference frames. How would you explain the following scenario? - You start running against the direction of a light beam that was fired towards you. Wouldn't you see light traveling faster than c? I mean yes, the information coming from that light beam will have a constant speed but won't that information reach me faster if I am running towards it?

Oh you've really outdone yourself with this one...

9:15 oh no Nick is hacking us all it's interesting that way after my death my gravity will reach Andromeda for however long I am alive. I know gravity doesn't really care about my mass being "alive" but I do.. and as long as I'm alive it is MY gravity =D

You got me with "...dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!"

This is one of your timeless videos Nick.

You're so good at explaining, thank you for making these videos!

I've felt that we're all made of thought, or mind. But 'Information' certainly works as well:) But my favorite by far is - Teach only Love, for that is what you are...

Ok, now that was one wild ride of a video, I'm gonna have to watch it again after I've digested what I was able to grasp on this first pass.

Thanks for featuring my bro in your video Love from India🙏

Good info, thanks. But it's increasingly evident that I'm going to need a bigger central nervous processing unit.

I normally watch vids at 1.25 or 1.5 speed and just realized there is no slower speed than 1. Outstanding content! I'll need to watch this again.

The best question for me is..."What causes the information"? Why is it there? What/who told it to do these "things" to us? And why? Oh...and by the way...you are fantastic. Keep up this BRILLIANT work.

This is literally the best science channel ever!

I think RU-vid hates you. I am subscribed to the channel, have left a thumbs up on nearly all of your videos, and somehow your new videos don`t show up as suggestions when they come out. I feel like this is hurting your growth. You have over 6000 subscribers but sometimes a per video view count of less than a 10th that. I have also never seen your videos in the side bar as recommended videos when I am watching videos by other creators on the same topic. You make great videos and its a shame the view count doesn't reflect that.

I have a question I hope you can answer, or perhaps a discussion that can begin others to think on this topic. As a molecular biologist, I have often wondered about other ways to categorize genes and other genetic elements. When I was an undergrad student I took a course in physics and the professor, who happened to the department chair, was trying to recruit students to their department. He came to each student, asked their major and why. When he came to me I told him I know several biologists in my family know they are limited in work and research, such marine biology as one cousin is. I said I wanted to get to the “bottom” of how things work biologically, so I am majoring in molecular biology and biochemistry. And I’ll never forget what he said...he said, “if you’re really interested in how things work...the only education that will satisfy that is physics. He said to me, “you may know how a gene works and functions in a macro or biological level, but a physicist can tell you why that molecular exists and how and why it will interact with others. He said “molecular biology is the bottom rung on your your biology ladder...but physics is the ground your ladder rests upon!” And since then, answers don’t satisfy me like they used to. I’ve seen the universe completely different in only the last week since I found your videos than my whole life before. Now back to my original question. Since genes are a collection of other specific molecules in a spec fixed arrangement, what about the energies of each nucleotide? Or more collectively, each gene. In molecular biology, the term “information” is often thrown around loosely. But my question is this: could energy and information “be” something? I mean, the specific genes affect the genes linear sequence. Those positions affect the three dimensional confirmation of the enzymes and proteins, very specifically it’s 3D structure. But with time and energy along with information, would you say genes, as collections of various nucleotides (DNA / RNA) are also specific energies? Forgive me if I am not expressing this clearly, but I am asking, like our minds have thoughts and knowledge, using specialized cells called neurons, they seem to carry information. But could it be said if genes, those specific sequential combinations of codons-proteins, each of those could also be unique information “bundles?” Well, hopefully you’ll be able to follow where I was going or trying to. I’ll explain further if you reply. Thank you. Lee

Information is never lost it can just become more random or complicated as its entropy increases. Even for objects falling into the Black Hole information is not lost. This is the result of great debate between Hawking and Susskind.

Amazing video and information Those 4. 1 frame pictures though

Information entropy is not only incredibly similar to physical entropy, it is the same thing. Just described in a different way. More specifically, physical entropy is information that is lost, has become unknown, is no longer useable. While in computer science and communication, the smallest unit of information is the bit (binary digit), physicists prefer the natural logarithm, measuring information in nits. But the thing that is measured is the same thing. There is an equivalence between energy and information (which depends on temperature, so there is the gradient required for energy).

"Mixedupness" is certainly increasing. No doubt about it. Excellent presentation!

This man is an absolute fukin legend. also Really appreciate the beetlejuice /بيت الجوزاء bit. The amount of information and clarity u squeeze in these videos is amazing man.

Great explanation, as always. I must admit the idea of information as physicists talk about it has always been more of a puzzle to me than quantum physics itself, which I am starting to get a handle on. Could you do a video on why physicists get so wrapped up on information? Why do they care so much that they have to have equations and such. Surely understanding quantum systems is far more like physics. I have a computer science background, and I totally get why IT people are hot on information, since that is what IT is all about. But why do physicists care about it so much?

How are you makinh videos so clearly?..How you search for information?How you prepare and explain it so neatly?Can u tell me @Nick?

Great timing. Really entertaining and I appreciate the work you put into producing your channel. learning something new. Thanks.

Hey Nick. Make a series of videos on electronics too which includes the components of logic gates and some logic circuits too because getting that explained from you would be EXTREMELY CRAZY & AWESOME!! Anyways man you're SUPERB and thank you for conveying all the INFORMATION!!!

You are doing super good man. Super funny and information is easy to understand

I'd like to weigh in. Imagine your gravestone, (which has been left for centuries because of a nuclear war or something), imagine your name on the inscription slowly fading until there is no possible way of reading it anymore. Your name is lost forever. The same goes for your body: as you age, more and more parts of it are unable to remember how to function properly: due to entropy the DNA software loses more and more data (information), until a point is reached called 'cascade collapse' This can be illustrated by an old building reaching a point where it finally caves in. When this collapse happens in your body, it is called death. Then entropy REALLY begins to take over until your body is eventually indistinguishable from topsoil, and the last bit of information about who you once were is lost forever.

@The Science Asylum I did the math - for a distant object to appear to be moving faster than light as a result of Earth's rotation, it would have to be almost as far away as Neptune (at opposition). Neptune is the nearest superluminal object to our observation. v=ωr, r = v/ω, r = c/(one day in radians per second) = 3.8 light hours

I've been quite convinced for a while now that your last sentence is actually true. I don't see any good reason to distinguish between "physical" information and meaning, or information "we made up". We've never experienced anything but the information we made up.

Hi. Love your videos. I know this is two years old or so (closer to three), but i just watched it and I had a wonder. I am not a physicist, just a thinker. As the universe keeps expanding, you said that entropy grows and more entropy is more information. I wonder if you go backwards towards the big bang. As that approaches entropy would be less(?) and therefore information would be less(?) At the singularity, then, would there be no information? Is that why we can't know anything about before that time?

The Beetlejuice gag kept making me laugh, to the point I yelled "stop it" after seeing it for like the 5th time. I think the more you see him the more the absurdity starts to get you. Ha. Also, nice f'ck'n' geometric model!!

I'm sure you mentioned somewhere that the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light if you go out far enough, and it would have been useful here perhaps despite the risk of blowing a few extra minds. This puzzled me for years before someone explained that it's space itself that is expanding, and as Lawrence Krauss pointed out, "space can do whatever it wants." Light speed is the (actually unattainable) maximum only for massive things traveling *through* space!

Nick, I got a little distracted when you mentioned relativity in the context of rotation. If you have a bucket of water and spin it about its vertical axis with constant angular velocity, the surface of the water becomes parabolic. But water outside the bucket is not (measurably?) affected. Unlike linear motion, there seems to be some asymmetry here… Why? If I spin myself round and round in my swivel chair, why are distant galaxies not experiencing enormous “centrifugal” forces? (My first degree is in Maths and Physics, so I am comfortable with relativity for linear motion.)

I always found your video entertaining and educational. Thanks.

I'm nitpicking here, but what you said at 6:38 isn't entirely accurate! The JPG image does not contain the same amount of information as the PNG and BMP counterparts! JPEG uses a lossy compression method where only a subset of the spacial frequencies present in the image are retained and most of the high frequency spacial information is discarded. PNG on the other hand uses LZW which simply put you can think of as factoring repeating bit patterns, which is lossless and can be expanded to the original string of bits later.

"it's okay to be a little crazy" Yeah, I don't know how you can spend so much time talking about this stuff and not go completely nuts.

HELLO TO YOU TOO

Could Entropy be described as complexity or novelty rather than just chaos?

WHY YOU HAVE ONLY AROUND 150K YOUR EXPLANATION IS SO GOOD YOU SHOULD HAVE 4 M SUB😍😍

Why didn't I find this channel sooner. Love the content!

Love the ghostbusters reference!

I know this is a 6 years old video, but I just want to say that the Morse code at the end says "Hello world". I look in the comments and didn't find anyone mention that. Great video as always. Cheers!

You make great videos man, keep up the good work!

Wow so this is the first video i commented on ....or maybe the second.....but wow..... Im honestly impressed ...... This is something i think about deeply....... solid facts are great.....well done....

In your quantum mechanics videos you basically said the collapse doesn't depend on consciousness (Ergo the Moon would still exist if a Mouse wasn't there to look at it.) So much as physical interaction (Ergo Measurements can only be taken by interaction with them in some way like a photon.) So I have a question/thought experiment. Let's say there is an Entity, let's call him Lucid's Demon (Since Maxwell and Laplace have demon's named after them.) That has the ability to "observe" particles and objects in the universe without physically interacting with them like some kind of Metaphysical Clairvoyance? Would the Wavefunction still "collapse" for that Being or would it be able to take measurements without that pesky uncertainty principle?

1:15 that was so scary!

What about time? Does time move faster than light? And instead of being made up of information could we be time? Or is information a way to measure some aspect of time, or something like that?

we are not loosing information. Information is always there if there is energy and mass/matter. if you combine those two youll get information transmission through time and space. Basically information is ever changing property of quantum but never equal to null, it can be delivered, transmitted and changed but it changes other entity who is in interaction with quantum. So it is never lost, its just traveling until there is energy and mass. Even if there is no receiver, information exist waiting to be measured and decompressed.

6:40 What's the difference between information and data? I didn't understand yet.

This is a great video. My mind is blown and I will not be able to return from state of crazy it created.

I love the "hello world" message at the end of the video. That was the first time in years my Morse code skills actually came in handy. LOL

Nice video - the timeline you often pop up is very interesting to put all that into perspective. Just a remark : i often heard from other contents that our current models of quantum mechanics implies that information is never lost - how does that go with the last video comment? Anyway thanks again for this interesting content, I wish I could store, process and understand all that information easier.

Is there a different way to explain squizophrenia with science? or is it just a chemistry/biology stuff that happens what makes it appear? or, better said, are there different ways to explain things depending on the science brand one choose to study with?

Is there anything stopping "information" from being "knowledge" of how atoms connect? Bell's Theorem shows that information can be passed instantaneously between entangled particles and I'm curious about what that might entail. I know we measure spins states to understand that information has passed, but am curious about what other information might be exchanged. Say carbon-based life has started somewhere in the galaxy and a particle interacts with that life and becomes entangled. If it were to continue out into the galaxy, would that make it any easier for carbon-based life to form in other parts of the galaxy/universe? Thanks!

sorry to be a nitpicker, this is how i pass my time: re the jpg, the png and the bmp, they're not all encoding the same amount of information. jpg and png are lossy encodings, but lossy in different ways. jpg uses a full color palette but may sacrifice some detail and takes advantages of shortcomings in the eye's ability to perceive differences in color to eliminate some data. png uses a 256-color palette and other than that reduction it's lossless. (24-bit png's are totally lossless like bmp.) bmp is totally lossless, all the original data in the digital image is stored, but it's not a very efficient encoding.

Scientific uses of the word "Information" can be quite confusing. For instance, Hawking argued that all information on things passing the event horizon was 'lost' forever. But Leonard Susskind and others disagreed. Quite a bust up! Another is entropy, which has been described as the _slow loss of information_ contained in the universe over time. Lots of fun in physics :0)

I think information is definitely reducing/decaying. Its a personal opinion but I like to think of information as the fabric of our reality. At the end of the universe, information will be warped and standardized. If a particle is a projection of its information, and that particle is in its highest state of decay, than the information is at its highest state as well. (Evenly entirely inert?)

So, one way I've heard it explained is that the information isn't fading or lost, it's becoming noise. The complexity of the information is actually growing but our ability to track it or get anything meaningful out of it decreases. Random static on your computer has more information than a neat organized pattern, it's just less useful to us.

I'm genuinely mind blown by this. Especially of the thought of a particle that hasn't interacted with anything yet

6.40 "Media.jpg" typically has LESS information than the other two. That is what the "lossy" means in the name of "lossy compression format". It still does have the information we care about though.

What about quantum entanglement? Information travels faster than speed of light between two entangled particles. How would you explain this?

What about entanglement? This can be faster than light right? How does that work? Also if 2 particals are entangled than if I rotate 1 upside down than would the other rotate with it? So could we communicate faster than light with these by using binary code, by flipping up and down causing the other end to c the opposite of what we do

Somehow it seems to me you completely evaded the original question posed. What is this continuously emerging stream of guidance manifesting the universe as we know it? Not only does it define but it actualizes behavior. Some aspects are relatively static while other aspects continually evolve. There is continuous reorganization yet the initial structures are quite permanent, like the law of gravity. How has it organized a universal matrix within a sea of other matrices in which emerging technology flows from the minds of beings defined by information? Yet it all seems very steadfast, as if there were a primeness to it all.

Nick is so smart, and he and his team are probably getting even smarter making these videos

great video man! keep it up! i usually get tired with longer videos, but that was really good. Maybe a little too much "information" (hahaha, but seriously.)

1:38 although I see what you mean, I'd be careful saying "Relativity says all reference frames are on equal footing". Relativity only grants that inertial frames are on equal footing. Kinematics allow you to transform between any reference frame at your convenience, but only inertial frames are invariant under the transformation.

The sublimal Beetlejuice is the greatest thing to happen in any youtube video ever! Thank you!

Please, avoid flashing images without a *WARNING* *FLASHING LIGHTS* (or similar) before the first of them. Thanks for minding.

Physical information is stored on waves as waves, this can be spun into matter or released to create forces. It is all information and it is always increasing in time. Our information can be lived and then sent out in waves that hold that information even entering a black hole it can just be re-spun into matter and stores that information that can now be released with new waves to imprint on them.

The relative distance an object 'appears to travel' does not include you (or the Earth) rotating as far as Special Relativity is concerned. Only the red shifting would be taken as a measure of it's relative velocity to us or motion across the sky independent of the Earths rotation around it's axis or the sun (which is trivial).

I still didn't get your definition of information. But I think if information is what allows things to arise and exist, including the process of change or entropy itself, then it follows that information of all things and processes is eternal, having no birth and no death. Because information has no material form, it is purely abstract and immaterial, therefore not subject to birth or death. Now all objects and processes contain information that describes their properties both physical and nonphysical. These objects can be man-made (an illusory term) or natural (an absolute term imo). This is how I see information as being eternal via example: the information for a car has always been in existence, but an actual car did not arise until proper conditions arose for its material birth. And after the end of the energetic and physical universe itself, that information will still exist, but no physical cars will exist since the conditions will no longer be appropriate. By logic, in order for a thing to ever arise and exist, there must first be the information for its existence to be possible. Therefore, if cars were an impossible thing, there would never have been information for such a device to ever exist in any time or condition. It would literally be impossible to arise because no such information ever existed. The fact that human minds can process information to fabricate cars is an illusory irrelevant note. Human beings have the hubris to believe that anything they make is 'unnatural, artificial' when in fact it is all a part of the natural laws and manifestations of the universe regardless of what humans believe. Thus there is no such thing as an "artificial' object. All things are natural and are made manifest due to natural laws. There is not one thing that is supernatural - ie: nothing exists in nature that does not follow nature's laws. IF there were supernatural things or entities, then that thing would never be able to exist or interact with our world which is ruled by, constituted by natural laws.

I may be wrong, but, as far as I know (physical) information is conserved. I think it's impossible to destroy it even if you wanted to (or even if you where a black hole :P). Other than that, the video rocks :D

Atypically, Nick is "Not even wrong" on this one. At 6:10 he shows the top half of the first page of Shannon's landmark 1948 paper. That's a nice touch; HOWEVER, in the lower half of that same page (not shown) Shannon issues a caveat: "Frequently the messages [under analysis in this paper] have meaning [...] These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem." It is tragic that Shannon did not simply say this: "My work with data communication mathematics has nothing to do with information; in fact, there is [as yet] no such thing as 'information theory' ." After all, that's exactly what he meant. What his paper concerns is data-encoding richness and error correction, not information. But how could he have anticipated that journalists, in search of a sexy synonym for 'the mathematics of data communication encoding methods' would coin the term 'information theory' to the world in the 1950s, and keep pimping it ever since, so very successfully at that? A simple example clarifies the difference between data and information: The letters y-e-s are three pieces of data. The word "yes" spoken by a dictator to his top general is information -- the information that might be the start of a genocide campaign: "Yes, I want you to exterminate them." Or, if spoken by a wife to her husband, that same word "yes" might convey, in abbreviated form, this information instead, based on context: "Yes, buy bananas." Information has to do with things like committing genocide versus buying bananas; data has to do with strings such as y-e-s versus y-e-q -- the latter being an unsuccessful attempt to transmit y-e-s. Physicists routinely talk in complete ignorance of what data and information are. For the general public not to understand the data/information distinction is forgivable. But I find it annoying to see how physicists always skip over this question of defining to the two terms, and immediately start pontificating about 'information theory' (there is no such thing) and 'physical information' (there is no such thing), apparently on the basis that "We physicists are smarter than others, so we don't need to pause to ask what data and information are; even dummies know what what those words mean, so of course we physicists automatically know what they mean and won't waste time defining them; they're both kinda the same thing anyway, aren't they?" (I believe it was Susskind who said something along those lines in a Q&A after one of his lectures: "Well, it seems to me that the two words are more or less interchangeable." Whereas, if anything, the two words are more like opposites than synonyms, as understood by those of us who actually deal with data processing on a daily basis.) I don't deny that physicists ARE smarter than the rest of us (and I love most of Nick's videos ), but dammit, why can't the physicists wake up about this one very important subject and stop promulgating 'information' nonsense? I expected better from Nick, since usually he seems quite aware of any such quirk or foible or sloppiness in Establishment Physics (as shown in his very nice video on "Why the earth keeps rotating" for instance, which is a nice example of his usual style).

Those beeps at the end: Nick sent a message to his homeworld of CraziLucid

I thoroughly enjoy your videos. Keep em coming

Excellent video! Really enjoy the Beetlejuice injections, the shock helps break up the density of information and refocus the mind for new learners - like me :) And it's crazy funny :D

That clock in the background is amazing

This is a comment of mine in Facebook. It is my 'insight' of what thoughts are, which are physical off course to me. I responded to a comment that said that your dream about a house, the thought of it is not physical. At the moment, I am a layman trying as much as he can to know stuff. Maybe later down the years I will be found correct who knows LOL? 😜 The comment was made minutes before coming here to see this video about information. So when you see a house, its quantum information is sent to your eyes via light I say; from the video I gather that the information should be lost? I don't understand what information is from this video but it's a decent introductory to it I guess. Thanks for reading! My guess/view (I don't and haven't found someone say something like that, no evidence I guess) is this: you dream a house right? Obviously, you had seen a lot of houses in your life and it happened to dream one. I say that the house you dreamt about is formed out of the memories you have of houses. The info can be mixed, the characteristics of the house you are dreaming can be from a lot of houses of your memory. I'm heading now towards the answer 🙂. The house doesn't need to exist in the form of it where you can enter etc. It exists as memory and the memory of the house is the information of the houses you saw with your eyes when you saw them. In other words, you see the house with your eyes and the quantum information of it is getting in your eyes through the light and transmute it into the code/'language'of neurons that your brain understands. When I say quantum information, I have in mind black holes when scientists talk whether or not information of the objects gotten into the black hole still exist while in it. Ad I said, I haven't seen anyone talk about this or any evidence so consider this perhaps an interesting take? 😜 Not that I have searched out hard and that I know what to search, what to type in google but yeah xd😜."

That "Jump to Conclusions" mat is from Office Space. :)

This video reminds me VSause's "how fast the shadow is". But electricity running opposite directions? From one's perspective, it would be almost 2c Electron is much slower but electricity itself is still information right?