

Essay contest: Is reality digital or analog? - o_nate
http://www.fqxi.org/community/essay

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hfinney
It's an interesting topic, but if you look at the challenge questions, most of
them raise issues with the idea that reality is digital. But from the little I
know, modern quantum theory is analog. The polarization state of a photon is
expressed as a point on a unit circle. That's analog. It takes an infinite
number of decimal places to precisely express the state of the photon. In that
sense, it represents an infinite amount of information.

But the paradox is that if you try to store information in the photon state
and then read it out, you can only store 1 bit. How much sense does that make,
that you have a state that takes an infinite amount of information to
represent, but in practice you can only store one bit? Why would there be such
an infinitely information-hungry infrastructure, to support such limited,
information-poor storage?

To put it in terms people around here might appreciate, imagine if Google
required an infinitely large cloud computer to store just one bit. They
wouldn't stay in business long. That's no way to run a universe.

