This is the draft version of a textbook, which aims to introduce the quantum information science viewpoints on condensed matter physics to graduate students in physics (or interested researchers). We keep the writing in a self-consistent way, requiring minimum background in quantum information science. Basic knowledge in undergraduate quantum physics and condensed matter physics is assumed. We start slowly from the basic ideas in quantum information theory, but wish to eventually bring the readers to the frontiers of research in condensed matter physics, including topological phases of matter, tensor networks, and symmetry-protected topological phases.
Running a brain-twisting thought experiment for real shows that information is a physical thing – so can we now harness the most elusive entity in the cosmos?
This is a nice little overview article of some of the history of thermodynamics relating to information in physics and includes some recent physics advances as well. There are a few references to applications in biology at the micro level as well.
We don’t yet know quite what a physics of biology will consist of. But we won’t understand life without it.
This is an awesome little article with some interesting thought and philosophy on the current state of physics within biology and other related areas of study. It’s also got some snippets of history which aren’t frequently discussed in longer form texts.
“The notion that counting more shapes in the sky will reveal more details of the Big Bang is implied in a central principle of quantum physics known as “unitarity.” Unitarity dictates that the probabilities of all possible quantum states of the universe must add up to one, now and forever; thus, information, which is stored in quantum states, can never be lost — only scrambled. This means that all information about the birth of the cosmos remains encoded in its present state, and the more precisely cosmologists know the latter, the more they can learn about the former.”
The Theory of Everything and Then Some: In complexity theory, physicists try to understand economics while sociologists think like biologists. Can they bring us any closer to universal knowledge?
Information is a precise concept that can be defined mathematically, but its relationship to what we call "knowledge" is not always made clear. Furthermore, the concepts "entropy" and "information", while deeply related, are distinct and must be used with care, something that is not always achieved in the literature. In this elementary introduction, the concepts of entropy and information are laid out one by one, explained intuitively, but defined rigorously. I argue that a proper understanding of information in terms of prediction is key to a number of disciplines beyond engineering, such as physics and biology.
Comments: 19 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society A
Subjects: Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems (nlin.AO); Information Theory (cs.IT); Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph); Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM)
Cite as:arXiv:1601.06176 [nlin.AO] (or arXiv:1601.06176v1 [nlin.AO] for this version)
Prior to the holidays Sean wrote a blogpost that contains a full overview table of contents, which will give everyone a stronger idea of its contents. For convenience I’ll excerpt it below.
Springer recently announced the publication of the book Quantum Biological Information Theory by Ivan B. Djordjevic, in which I’m sure many readers here will have interest. I hope to have a review of it shortly after I’ve gotten a copy. Until then…
From the publisher’s website:
This book is a self-contained, tutorial-based introduction to quantum information theory and quantum biology. It serves as a single-source reference to the topic for researchers in bioengineering, communications engineering, electrical engineering, applied mathematics, biology, computer science, and physics. The book provides all the essential principles of the quantum biological information theory required to describe the quantum information transfer from DNA to proteins, the sources of genetic noise and genetic errors as well as their effects.
Integrates quantum information and quantum biology concepts;
Assumes only knowledge of basic concepts of vector algebra at undergraduate level;
Provides a thorough introduction to basic concepts of quantum information processing, quantum information theory, and quantum biology;
Includes in-depth discussion of the quantum biological channel modelling, quantum biological channel capacity calculation, quantum models of aging, quantum models of evolution, quantum models on tumor and cancer development, quantum modeling of bird navigation compass, quantum aspects of photosynthesis, quantum biological error correction.
From the Physics Research Conference 2015-2016
on Thursday, November 19, 2015 at 4:00 pm
at the California Institute of Technology, East Bridge 201 – Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics, East
In recent years we have learned that the physics of quantum information plays a crucial role in the emergence of spacetime from microscopic degrees of freedom.
I will review the idea that entanglement is the glue which holds spacetime together and show how Einstein’s equations plausibly emerge from this perspective. One ubiquitous feature of these dynamical equations is the formation of black holes, so I will conclude by discussing some new ideas about the nature of spacetime inside a black hole.
Brian Swingle, postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics and physicist focusing on quantum matter, quantum information, and quantum gravity
in Physics Research Conference | Caltech
I just ordered a copy of Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo. Although it seems more focused on economics, the base theory seems to fit right into some similar thoughts I’ve long held about biology.
Why Information Grows: The Evolutiion of Order from Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo
From the book description:
“What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT’s antidisciplinarian César Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic growth demands transcending the social sciences and including the natural sciences of information, networks, and complexity. To understand the growth of economies, Hidalgo argues, we first need to understand the growth of order.
At first glance, the universe seems hostile to order. Thermodynamics dictates that over time, order–or information–will disappear. Whispers vanish in the wind just like the beauty of swirling cigarette smoke collapses into disorderly clouds. But thermodynamics also has loopholes that promote the growth of information in pockets. Our cities are pockets where information grows, but they are not all the same. For every Silicon Valley, Tokyo, and Paris, there are dozens of places with economies that accomplish little more than pulling rocks off the ground. So, why does the US economy outstrip Brazil’s, and Brazil’s that of Chad? Why did the technology corridor along Boston’s Route 128 languish while Silicon Valley blossomed? In each case, the key is how people, firms, and the networks they form make use of information.
Seen from Hidalgo’s vantage, economies become distributed computers, made of networks of people, and the problem of economic development becomes the problem of making these computers more powerful. By uncovering the mechanisms that enable the growth of information in nature and society, Why Information Grows lays bear the origins of physical order and economic growth. Situated at the nexus of information theory, physics, sociology, and economics, this book propounds a new theory of how economies can do, not just more, but more interesting things.”
John Baez, one of the organizers of the workshop, is also going through them and adding some interesting background and links on his Azimuth blog as well for those who are looking for additional details and depth
The article made me wonder about the divide between the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ sciences, and how we might better define and delineate them. Perhaps in a particular field, the greater the proliferation of “schools of though,” the more likely something is to be a soft science? (Or mathematically speaking, there’s an inverse relationship in a field between how well supported it is and the number of schools of thought it has.) I consider a school of thought to be a hypothetical/theoretical proposed structure meant to potentially help advance the state of the art and adherents join one of many varying camps while evidence is built up (or not) until one side carries the day.
Simple linear approximation of the relationship, though honestly something more similar to y=1/x which is asymptotic to the x and y axes is far more realistic.
Theorem: The greater the proliferation of “schools of though,” the more likely something is to be a soft science.
Generally in most of the hard sciences like physics, biology, or microbiology, there don’t seem to be any opposing or differing schools of thought. While in areas like psychology or philosophy they abound, and often have long-running debates between schools without any hard data or evidence to truly allow one school to win out over another. Perhaps as the structure of a particular science becomes more sound, the concept of schools of thought become more difficult to establish?
For some of the hard sciences, it would seem that schools of thought only exist at the bleeding edge of the state-of-the-art where there isn’t yet enough evidence to swing the field one way or another to firmer ground.
Example: Evolutionary Biology
We might consider the area of evolutionary biology in which definitive evidence in the fossil record is difficult to come by, so there’s room for the opposing thoughts for gradualism versus punctuated equilibrium to be individual schools. Outside of this, most of evolutionary theory is so firmly grounded that there aren’t other schools.
Example: Theoretical Physics
The relatively new field of string theory might be considered a school of thought, though there don’t seem to be a lot of other opposing schools at the moment. If it does, such a school surely exists, in part, because there isn’t the ability to validate it with predictions and current data. However, because of the strong mathematical supporting structure, I’ve yet to hear anyone use the concept of school of thought to describe string theory, which sits in a community which seems to believe its a foregone conclusion that it or something very close to it represents reality. (Though for counterpoint, see Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics.)
Example: Mathematics
To my knowledge, I can’t recall the concept of school of thought ever being applied to mathematics except in the case of the Pythagorean School which historically is considered to have been almost as much a religion as a science. Because of its theoretical footings, I suppose there may never be competing schools, for even in the case of problems like P vs. NP, individuals may have some gut reaction to which way things are leaning, everyone ultimately knows it’s going to be one or the other ( or ). Many mathematicians also know that it’s useful to try to prove a theorem during the day and then try to disprove it (or find a counterexample) by night, so even internally and individually they’re self-segregating against creating schools of thought right from the start.
Example: Religion
Looking at the furthest end of the other side of the spectrum, because there is no verifiable way to prove that God exists, there has been an efflorescence of religions of nearly every size and shape since the beginning of humankind. Might we then presume that this is the softest of the ‘sciences’?
What examples or counter examples can you think of?
Four decades ago, Stephen Hawking posed the black hole information paradox about black holes and quantum theory. It still challenges the imaginations of theoretical physicists today. Yesterday, Amanda Peet (University of Toronto) presented the a lecture entitled “String Theory Legos for Black Holes” yesterday at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. A quick overview/teaser trailer for the lecture follows along with some additional information and the video of the lecture itself.
The “Information Paradox” with Amanda Peet (teaser trailer)
“Black holes are the ‘thought experiment’ par excellence, where the big three of physics – quantum mechanics, general relativity and thermodynamics – meet and fight it out, dragging in brash newcomers such as information theory and strings for support. Though a unification of gravity and quantum field theory still evades string theorists, many of the mathematical tools and ideas they have developed find applications elsewhere.
One of the most promising approaches to resolving the “information paradox” (the notion that nothing, not even information itself, survives beyond a black hole’s point-of-no-return event horizon) is string theory, a part of modern physics that has wiggled its way into the popular consciousness.
On May 6, 2015, Dr. Amanda Peet, a physicist at the University of Toronto, will describe how the string toolbox allows study of the extreme physics of black holes in new and fruitful ways. Dr. Peet will unpack that toolbox to reveal the versatility of strings and (mem)branes, and will explore the intriguing notion that the world may be a hologram.
Amanda Peet is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Toronto. She grew up in the South Pacific island nation of Aotearoa/New Zealand, and earned a B.Sc.(Hons) from the University of Canterbury in NZ and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in the USA. Her awards include a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. She was one of the string theorists interviewed in the three-part NOVA PBS TV documentary “Elegant Universe”.
“My vision of life is that everything extends from replicators, which are in practice DNA molecules on this planet. The replicators reach out into the world to influence their own probability of being passed on. Mostly they don’t reach further than the individual body in which they sit, but that’s a matter of practice, not a matter of principle. The individual organism can be defined as that set of phenotypic products which have a single route of exit of the genes into the future. That’s not true of the cuckoo/reed warbler case, but it is true of ordinary animal bodies. So the organism, the individual organism, is a deeply salient unit. It’s a unit of selection in the sense that I call a “vehicle”. There are two kinds of unit of selection. The difference is a semantic one. They’re both units of selection, but one is the replicator, and what it does is get itself copied. So more and more copies of itself go into the world. The other kind of unit is the vehicle. It doesn’t get itself copied. What it does is work to copy the replicators which have come down to it through the generations, and which it’s going to pass on to future generations. So we have this individual replicator dichotomy. They’re both units of selection, but in different senses. It’s important to understand that they are different senses.”
Richard Dawkins
RICHARD DAWKINS is an evolutionary biologist; Emeritus Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, The Selfish Gene; The Extended Phenotype; Climbing Mount Improbable; The God Delusion; An Appetite For Wonder; and (forthcoming) A Brief Candle In The Dark.
Watch the entire video interview and read the transcript at Edge.org.
Over the next few days, I’ll be maintaining a Storify story covering information related to and coming out of the Information Theory and Entropy Workshop being sponsored by NIMBios at the Unviersity of Tennessee, Knoxville.
For those in attendance or participating by watching the live streaming video (or even watching the video after-the-fact), please feel free to use the official hashtag #entropyWS, and I’ll do my best to include your tweets, posts, and material into the story stream for future reference.
For journal articles and papers mentioned in/at the workshop, I encourage everyone to join the Mendeley.com group ITBio: Information Theory, Microbiology, Evolution, and Complexity and add them to the group’s list of papers. Think of it as a collaborative online journal club of sorts.
Those participating in the workshop are also encouraged to take a look at a growing collection of researchers and materials I maintain here. If you have materials or resources you’d like to contribute to the list, please send me an email or include them via the suggestions/submission form or include them in the comments section below.
Christoph Adami (arxiv.org)
I’ll note that it looks like it also assumes some reasonable facility with quantum mechanics in addition to the material listed above.
Amanda Peet is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Toronto. She grew up in the South Pacific island nation of Aotearoa/New Zealand, and earned a B.Sc.(Hons) from the University of Canterbury in NZ and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in the USA. Her awards include a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. She was one of the string theorists interviewed in the three-part NOVA PBS TV documentary “Elegant Universe”. 
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