What kind of society takes pains to encode multiple backups of things like individual tax records or old emails while at the same time allows the actual material record of its deceased to decompose in crude graves? Certainly not the Egyptians. Giant stone tombs encapsulating well-preserved mummies have transported the world-weary imprint and likeness of dignitaries like King Tut to the modern era and beyond, making them the most effective resurrection machines man has yet to build. A recent article appearing in the New Journal of Physics attempts to answer an intriguing question that would have weighed heavily on the minds of these early curators: how much information can be preserved through the full duration of our universe if the encoding of that information is not limited by any embalming, construction, or server technology, but rather by the fundamental constraints of physical law?
The way the authors approach the problem is to construct a simplified theoretical model of our universe based on what is known as the Robertson-Walker (RW) spacetime. A full 3+1 (3 space plus 1 time dimension) spacetime is an exact solution to Einstein’s field equations of general relativity, which describes either an expanding or contracting homogeneous universe. The make things more tractable the authors consider only the case of an open, expanding universe with just a single space and single time dimension. Distilled into a simple sentence, their main conclusion is that the faster the universe expands, the more difficult it becomes to preserve information indefinitely……..
See full story on extremetech.com
Image courtesy of extremetech.com