At 07:22 PM 8/13/2013, Rowan Hamilton wrote:
Really smart guys are confused by this issue. And even Ed Witten is staying silent. To me, that means that the jury is still out while the experts digest things.
Yea, these are the same 'really smart guys' who built their physics on _infinitely precise_ real numbers. These are the same 'really smart guys' who have (mostly) ignored the concept of 'information' for the past 60+ years. They've now swept too many infinities under the rug, and those bulges in the rug refuse to go away. The situation in physics today is analogous to that of Ptolemaic astronomy prior to Copernicus: it isn't right, but it gives such great answers that they refuse to give it up. Maxwell formulated the main problem with Maxwell's Demon. No one since has really made that much progress, and the subsequent development of quantum mechanics made the situation considerably stranger. The field of quantum computation started out on the right track, but was hijacked by more traditional physicists before being able to provide new insights. I believe that the right answer is tied up with quantum computation, but someone will have to first come up with a new name for the field, so that all of the assumptions can be re-examined, before further progress will be made. The lack of progress in solving these problems, which I generally put under the heading of 'Second Law' problems, is related to the fact that there are relatively few people working on them. Whatever progress has been made is mostly afterthoughts and stolen moments from more 'pressing' research: building bombs, building larger colliders, getting Nobel prizes, etc. Bottom line: novelty doesn't come from large organizations with billions of dollars at stake; novelty comes from individuals willing to question every assumption -- e.g., some random patent clerk in Switzerland.