Fumfer Physics 8: Distinguishing Energy and Matter in an Informational Universe

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How do you distinguish energy and matter in an informational framework?

Rick Rosner: I do not really know. For me, it always goes back to macrostructures—things big enough to have permanence: stars, galaxies, planets, the large-scale structure of the universe. You can describe most of the physics of macrostructures in terms of electrons, protons, and neutrons. You can also account for most of the energy. Matter has kinetic energy, but energy in itself—massless or nearly massless stuff—travels at or near the speed of light. Its energy comes from that motion: photons and neutrinos, essentially.

Jacobsen: The question was: How do you distinguish matter and energy in an informational universe?

Rosner: You could describe the physics of information storage and processing using five primary particles: protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, and neutrinos.

However, within atoms and within some of these particles, you have quarks, gluons, mesons—you have dozens of other particles that mediate interactions with the big five. As for cosmic rays, I am unsure what fraction is not composed of photons. 

I am showing my ignorance here, but I would guess that for a particle to be considered a cosmic ray, it is usually something more exotic—maybe a meson or a muon—making it to Earth and decaying in our atmosphere. That is pretty cosmic.

It has the capacity to do a great deal of damage—more than stray photons or even X-rays. Well, X-rays are photons, just extremely high-energy ones. I would estimate that the fraction of energy emitted from the Sun that is not in the form of photons or neutrinos is tiny. 

In stellar fusion, approximately 2–3% of the released energy is emitted as neutrinos, while the remaining energy ultimately appears as electromagnetic radiation (photons). Non-photon, non-neutrino channels—mainly the kinetic and magnetic energy carried by the solar wind—are minuscule, of order one-millionth of the Sun’s photon luminosity.

Most “exotic” particles do not stream away from the Sun in bulk. Gluons, for example, are confined: quarks and gluons are not observed in isolation at ordinary energies but locked inside hadrons (protons, neutrons, mesons).

For macro-physics, you can mostly get by with a small cast: photons and long-lived composite matter like atoms (electrons bound to nuclei made of protons and neutrons). Free neutrons are not long-lived, but neutrons bound inside stable nuclei effectively are; that is what lets macroscopic structures persist. 

Photons and gravity act over long ranges, which is crucial for large-scale organization. (Neutrinos also traverse huge distances, but they interact so weakly that they rarely shape macroscopic structure.) These ingredients are enough to knit the universe into a system that can store and propagate information without invoking short-lived or confined particles. (That is a metaphor, not teleology.)

In terms of “energy vs. matter,” they are related by E=mc2E=mc2; you can transform mass to energy and vice versa in specific processes. However, they play different informational roles. Photons can travel vast distances and, by interacting with matter, change spatial structure—writing information into the arrangement of atoms and fields. 

Protons, electrons, and neutrons cluster into atoms and larger structures, giving you stable media that preserve information across time. Working together, “matter carriers” and “energy carriers” allow information to be stored, moved, erased, and reused.

Matter clumps into stars and larger structures; stars then “boil down” nuclear binding energy into photons (and a small neutrino component), returning energy to their environments. Despite tremendous progress, there is still plenty we do not understand in detail—especially the turbulent, magnetized plasma that mediates much of this.

Jacobsen: In terms of the universe as an “information processor,” returning to non-computable possible universes: a recent line of work (including colleagues’ papers co-authored by Lawrence Krauss) argues that some aspects of a final theory might be non-algorithmic in a formal, Gödel/Tarski/Chaitin sense, with spacetime emerging above that layer. That framing does not negate existing physics; it proposes limits on what a purely algorithmic “theory of everything” can capture.

Rosner: I do not love that either. The universe forms associations when a couple of protons fuse into deuterium. When two deuterium nuclei fuse to form helium, they form an association. They are not literally “calculating.” You could argue it is a kind of computation—that when two nucleons get close enough together, they fuse into a heavier nucleus. 

That could be framed as a computation: “these conditions were met, therefore fusion occurs.” However, to me, it feels more like an association or correlation, rather than a computation. The universe is a correlation engine, which is evocative, since artificial intelligence is also built as a set of correlation engines. Bayesian probability is essentially the mathematics of correlation.

Jacobsen: If we change the framing away from computation and algorithms—or away from “non-computation” and “non-algorithmic embedding of reality”—then could we reframe the kinds of operations computers do as being embedded within a larger associational network? That is an open question, and I do not know where it leads. 

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.