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To: js1138
js1138  wrote:
can you prove there is more information in the universe now than during the big bang? I've never seen any consensus on this among physicists.


I don't know. I took it as self-evident. Does a uniform mixture of simple gases contain the same amount of information as the genetic code of a bacterium? Or even the simplest short story ever written? Actually, the original question I posed dealt with the increase of information between the first living thing and human beings, but somehow it got turned into a discussion of the big bang. I am not aware of any controversy on whether or not the genetic code of human beings contains more information than the simplest of organisms.
1,338 posted on 03/05/2003 9:43:43 AM PST by Rachumlakenschlaff
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To: Rachumlakenschlaff
Does a uniform mixture of simple gases contain the same amount of information as the genetic code of a bacterium?

That would depend on size. There's more gas than bacteria in the universe.

1,339 posted on 03/05/2003 9:47:27 AM PST by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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To: Rachumlakenschlaff
Does a uniform mixture of simple gases contain the same amount of information as the genetic code of a bacterium?

A uniform mix of simple gas molecules is very "complex" and thus has a lot of information-theory "information." It does, that is, if you're trying to specify the exact, exact, exact, exact state of the gas at a given moment. But there's no point in doing that, because in another tenth of a second the gas will be in an utterly different exact, exact, exact, exact state. (That is, every one of its molecules will have moved and banged into a neighbor hundreds of times over the interval.) For almost any real purpose under the sun, the gas can be completely described with some information about temperature, pressure, maybe chemical composition ... a statistical summary.

By comparison, your bacterium is "simple." It has lots of liquids, in which molecules are not so free to move as in a gas, and solids, which are even more predictable. It would be far harder to statistically summarize the bacterium, but that's not the point of the really technical definitions of information you see in some disciplines.

That's why it is necessary to get your terms straight, and why people like Dembski can dazzle willing creationists with BS. Certain kinds of "information" and "order" can't go up in the universe, but what most people think of as "order," "information," and "complexity" have done nothing but go up.

1,343 posted on 03/05/2003 11:01:52 AM PST by VadeRetro
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To: Rachumlakenschlaff
What do you mean by 'information'? Are you sure it's not the term 'meaning' you have in mind?
1,345 posted on 03/05/2003 11:29:56 AM PST by BMCDA
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To: Rachumlakenschlaff
Your invocation of information theory is just a stealth version of the second law of thermodynamics. In both cases, local hills and valleys do not affect total content. Islands of information can arise in the universe without affecting the total information content of the universe.
1,346 posted on 03/05/2003 11:46:40 AM PST by js1138
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