Amount of Information in Visible Universe Quantified
AnonTechie writes:
Researchers have long suspected a connection between information and the physical universe, with various paradoxes and thought experiments used to explore how or why information could be encoded in physical matter. The digital age propelled this field of study, suggesting that solving these research questions could have tangible applications across multiple branches of physics and computing.
In AIP Advances, a University of Portsmouth researcher attempts to shed light on exactly how much of this information is out there and presents a numerical estimate for the amount of encoded information in all the visible matter in the universe-approximately 6 times 10 to the power of 80 bits of information. While not the first estimate of its kind, this study's approach relies on information theory.
[...] To produce the estimate, the author used Shannon's information theory to quantify the amount of information encoded in each elementary particle in the observable universe as 1.509 bits of information. Mathematician Claude Shannon, called the Father of the Digital Age because of his work in information theory, defined this method for quantifying information in 1948.
Does this take into account all the junk mail and spam?
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.