Seven people were nothing

Further to my last post.

From John le Carré "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold". Liz is depressed by the poor attendance at the Party Meetings when she visits East Germany - they are no better then the Communist Party meetings she attended back in Bayswater, London.

At last, on the fourth day, the Thursday, came their own Branch Meeting. This was to be, for Liz at least, the most exhilarating experience of all; it would be an example of all that her own Branch in Bayswater could be one day. They had chosen a wonderful title for the evening's discussions - Coexistence after two wars - and they expected a record attendance. The whole ward had been circularised, they had taken care to see that there was no rival meeting in the neighbourhood that evening; it was not a late shopping day.
Seven people came.
Seven people and Liz and the Branch Secretary and the man from the District. Liz put a brave face on it but she was terribly upset. [...] It was like the meetings in Bayswater, it was like mid-week evensong when she used to go to Church - the same dutiful little group of lost faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people. She always felt the same thing - it was awful, really, but she did - she wished no one would turn up, because that was absolute and it suggested persecution, humiliation - it was something you could react to.
But seven people were nothing: they were worse than nothing, because they were evidence of the inertia of the uncapturable mass. They broke your heart.

There would be a message, information, in no one turning up, but seven people is thermodynamic equilibrium.

Absence of information is the real nothing; not absence of stuff

The current New Scientist is a Special Issue on 'Nothing'. They've got five articles linked to the theme:

1. From zero to hero. About the history of the mathematical symbol for '0', and the mathematical concept of zero.
2. Nothing in common. Building maths starting from the concept of the empty set
3. The hole story. How the concept of a 'hole' as a positively-charged particle rather than just the absence of an electron was crucial to the development of solid-state electronics
4. Out of the ether. Vacuum field - how quantum mechanics leads to the understanding that a vacuum is actually seething with particles emerging and disappearing
5. Putting the ideal to work. The discovery and value of Noble gases.

An interesting topic (though already pretty familiar to most readers of the New Scientist, I would have thought), but there's nothing there about information - they've missed the big story again!

It is the absence of information that is the real nothing, not the absence of stuff.  It is similar to what I was saying about going faster than light. Stuff (matter/energy) only has any significance insofar as it carries information. A complete 'grey death' of the universe (thermodynamic equilibrium over the whole universe) would be a real nothing.

Like so much on this blog, I've got ideas about this, but other people have explored nothing and information much more rigorously.

Vlatko Vedral and Rainer Zimmermann talking about nothing. 

At DTMD 2011, Vlatko Vedral introduced some of his ideas on how informational thinking provides insights into the fundamental question of how something comes from nothing. You can pick up his presentation from the DTMD 2011 proceedings page (or directly: Abstract Presentation Podcast). Vedral, though, was challenged by Rainer Zimmermann, one of the other delegates at the workshop, during the panel session after Vedral's presentation, and you can listen to that too: Panel Discussion (42 MByte mp3 file). Specifically, Zimmermann, says

I find the categories of nothingness and non-being mixed up...so the consequence is that your God metaphor and also your card game is not correct because it is not demonstrating what you would like to demonstrate. For instance saying that God himself would not know entails that you think of the assembly of knowledge for God, or substance, or whatever you would like to call it, in an anthropomorphic way, but it is obviously not logical at all. That is actually an idea going back to Spinoza in the seventeenth century. On the other hand, the card game is not telling anything about nothingness, because what you actually show is that if you discard the means of representation in favour of another means for instance by skipping the cards and doing that in an abstract way, for instance playing blind chess..., you are not actually doing anything ontological, all you do is switch the means of representation, so in fact there is not nothingness but it is quite a lot.  Independent of the case nothingness in philosophical terms is not nothing, that is the point, it is actually the foundation of non-being. And non being is what is not but could be, it's a possibility. We had that already earlier in the keynote of Hofkirchner's field of possibilities and nothingness is the foundation of non-being. By coincidence on Friday afternoon I will give a talk on nothingness at the University of London...

(I've kept the reference to his University of London talk to point to the fact that he - Zimmermann - has been researching nothingness.  I need to find out more!)

Talk of non-being, field of possibilities, what could be, puts me very much in mind of Rubem Alves writing in The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet of how the discovery of a dead body of man has all sorts of consequences precisely because he is dead - because he is not there (I referred to this in passing once before). However, I am aware I'm on shaky ground there, and I'm not sure Dr Zimmermann would approve!

Things that are not there

If I had time, I would now say something about The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet by Rubem Alves who has a lot to say about this sort of thing, though coming at it from a rather different direction.

OK, I'm never going to have time to write as much as I want, so I'll put something down anyway.

Alves talks a lot about words and silence, about things that are not there. He quotes a story, which he says he read in something written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez but he suspects is an ancient story, of a dead man washing up on the shore near a village. Arrival of the dead body brings life back to a suffocating community, as everyone tells there own story, transferred to the dead man. It could never have happened, had that man arrived at the village alive. It is his absence that releases their own stories.

Information in the gaps

(I started drafting this on 10th December, but I was unwell, then there was Christmas and New Year... and it is now 7th January.)

Thanks to Tony Hirst for pointing me to this talk by David Weinberger. Weinberger talks of the importance of what is not said. He refers to the rise of the implicit, what we don't say, the unsaid. I think he's talking about context, a topic that arose repeatedly at an internal seminar exploring 'The Nature of Information' that we had at the OU last October.

If I had time, I would now say something about The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet by Rubem Alves who has a lot to say about this sort of thing, though coming at it from a rather different direction.

I would also, perhaps, though you might take a bit of convincing that it is relevant, say something about 'dark signalling' in optical fibre communication, which was my proposal in my PhD thesis...