Nov 4, 2014 02:18 AM
http://plus.maths.org/content/bekenstein
EXCERPT: Do you remember telephone books? These great big lumbering things, often yellow, were once an indispensible part of every household. Today we don't need them anymore, as we can store several phone books' worth of information on small devices we carry around in our pockets. Those devices will also soon be outdated. And one day in the not too distant future our control of information will be complete. We will be able to encode an infinite amount of it on tiny little chips we can implant in our brains.
Except that we won't. Not because of a lack of technological know-how, but because the laws of nature don't allow it. There is only so much information you can cram into a region of space that contains a finite amount of matter. "We are talking about information in the sense of something that you can store and reproduce," explains Jacob Bekenstein, the physicist who first came up with this limit of information in the early 1980s. "[To be able to do that] you need a physical manifestation of it; it could be on paper, or it could be electronically [stored]."
Bekenstein isn't a computer scientist or engineer, but a theoretical physicist. When he came up with the Bekenstein bound, as the information limit is now known, he was thinking about a riddle posed by black holes....
EXCERPT: Do you remember telephone books? These great big lumbering things, often yellow, were once an indispensible part of every household. Today we don't need them anymore, as we can store several phone books' worth of information on small devices we carry around in our pockets. Those devices will also soon be outdated. And one day in the not too distant future our control of information will be complete. We will be able to encode an infinite amount of it on tiny little chips we can implant in our brains.
Except that we won't. Not because of a lack of technological know-how, but because the laws of nature don't allow it. There is only so much information you can cram into a region of space that contains a finite amount of matter. "We are talking about information in the sense of something that you can store and reproduce," explains Jacob Bekenstein, the physicist who first came up with this limit of information in the early 1980s. "[To be able to do that] you need a physical manifestation of it; it could be on paper, or it could be electronically [stored]."
Bekenstein isn't a computer scientist or engineer, but a theoretical physicist. When he came up with the Bekenstein bound, as the information limit is now known, he was thinking about a riddle posed by black holes....
