The Bekenstein Bound

John K Clark (johnkc@well.com)
Mon, 23 Dec 1996 09:29:23 -0800 (PST)


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The Bekenstein Bound is thought by almost everybody to be true, because it
just seems like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle expressed in a different
way, however nobody has yet been able to formally prove it. There are several
"proofs" floating around in the literature, but all of them are wrong,
I think even Bekenstein would admit that.

Even if The Bekenstein Bound is true, Tipler found a way that the Universe
could hold an infinite amount of information, he wants to store information
as standing waves that span the entire universe. As the universe shrinks
toward The Big Crunch the amount of time needed to access this information is
reduced too, but so is the amount of energy needed to store a bit of
information, because you need to keep making your information storing photons
at a shorter and shorter wavelength and that takes energy. If you only have a
finite amount of energy this would be a fatal problem, but if the universe
shrinks to a geometric point then the amount of gravitational energy in the
Universe would diverge to infinity, and if the collapse is NOT symmetrical
then the energy is usable because one part of the sky would be hotter than
another so you can run a heat engine.

Before we can know if this would really work we need a Quantum Theory of
Gravity so we can know what happens when the Universe gets smaller than
10^-33cm, The Plank Length. By the way, I'm looking forward to reading
Hans Moravec's new book "MIND AGE", I think it's a scandal he's had so much
trouble getting it published.

John K Clark johnkc@well.com

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