Science-III: What is a Quantum Of Information?

Science-III: What is a Quantum Of Information?

INTRODUCTION

The identification of the quantum of information has no satisfactory definition and appears to be a very difficult subject to pin down: almost like the Bigfoot or Sasquatch, the concept of quantum information quanta remain elusive.

In stark contrast, computational information theory, is defined using the bit, which is really just a nomenclature for a digit, whether a 0 or a 1, in the binary representation system.  From this concept, analogs such as Qubit (aka the Quantum Bit) for representing two possible states and the Qutrit for three possible states as well as Qudit for multiple states have arisen in order to produce some language to talk about information.  The basic assumption underlying Quantum Science is that energy somehow corresponds to information because it is energy that is needed in order to store information at the level: this energy, itself, must be at minimum, quantized according to the minimum energy level.  So the model we have is implicitly tied to the physicality of information storage.  The question here is whether this assumption is actually valid, useful and productive.  Must information quanta be necessarily based on energy?

One basic problem starts when you look for a definition of information that everyone can agree on.  You will find that there are a very large and diverse if not completely different definitions of information on the web, all competing to be the right definition in the literature.

In the Quantum context, the observer is a participant in the measurement and therefore information becomes subjective.  In the alternative theories about the Quantum context, such as the Bohm Pilot Wave theory,  then the observer is not a participant and information becomes objective.

So the first difficulty is picking whether information is subjective, objective, or indeterminate between subjective and objective reference (i.e. interactive).  Is the Quantum context entangled or separate from its environment in terms of a systems view? According to Bohm, it is objective.  According to Schrödinger it is subjective (and hence, Schrödinger's cat).

Let us take a trip back in time to Bernard Patten, who in 1980, wrote a wonderfully inspiring paper entitled "ENVIRONS:  Relativistic Elementary Particles for the Environment" which you can find online here:  Environs

Bernard Patten developed a model of information for studying ecosystems based on mathematical systems theory where concept an organism interacting with its environment formed a single integral system constituting a single ecological unit (the ‘fundamental particle’ of ecology) called the "environ".  Later, he refined his concepts into six parts:  holon, taxon, creaon, genon, environ, and enviroplasm.

These concepts were used to develop an iterative, interacting, systems model of ecology. We will, shortly, see how these items entwine in a prospective definition for a quantum of information.

But before we can do that, we need to take another side road: infons.  The unit of information, an infon, is as close a word as you can get to the notion of a quantum of information.

Niels Bohr stated, for his complementarity theory, that "It is not possible to make one unambiguous picture (model) of reality, as uncertainty limits our knowledge".  That this uncertainty is caused by the influence of the observer as participant is inevitable in Quantum systems and therefore, implies that the character of the nature of information is that it is forever incomplete and uncertain.

Stonier developed a model based on the idea of the infon as pure quantum of information and with a status as fundamental as that of the fermions and bosons.  Devlin uses the term infon for his conception of information as well though the model proposed is different though equally valid.

The ontological status of current theories is that they use an implicit state representation and that the configuration of states is equivalent to the permutation of bits. Hence, states and bits become equivalent as structural system descriptions.  The problems arise when trying to render kinetic systems descriptions because then one has to choose a discrete time and a transition method to say how one state transforms into another. 

I have run out of time as I work to finalize some code and other things ... oh well, [MORE NEXT TIME ON THE IDEA OF A QUANTUM OF INFORMATION].