does information have a law of conservation? if not, what are the implications?

Ayesha Genova: That's a tough question. The problem is that 'information' is not a very well defined word. To some extent, energy is a form of information. For example, if an atom is in the ground state or the excited state is a piece of information, and it is also an energy, because there is an energetic difference between the two possible states of the information. If there weren't an energetic difference, then the two states would be indistinguishable and there would be no information. On the other hand, information can be more complicated, as well. The second law of thermodynamics puts a practical (and possibly fundamental) limit on the conservation of information. Imagine I have a box with two holes in it and I can put a handful of marbles in either hole A or hole B. Which hole the marbles entered is information. But once the marbles enter, they go to the same place and it become impossible to figure out which hole they entered through. This is a loss of in! formation that is practically (and possibly fundamentally) impossible to avoid. So, because information is a hard thing to define, there is no general law of conservation for information. However, in certain systems, in certain limits, there can be information conservation. By the way, matter is not really conserved either. Matter can (and does) annihilate with antimatter. And matter can be created (along with antimatter) from energy (see "pair production" for example). And energy is only conserved in an inertial reference frame.EDITI don't really see how information can come from nothing. But I guess I don't really need to know that to answer you. Energy and matter can not come from nothing. Matter can come from energy and energy can come from matter annihilating with antimatter (though matter and antimatter are forms of energy). But neither energy nor matter can 'come from nothing', in a strict sense. There is talk about quantum fluctuations creating particles ! or energy or whatnot. And this does happen to some extent. H! owever, there is a big caveat there. Perhaps you are familiar with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that the absolute momentum and absolute position of a particle can not be simultaneously known to infinite accuracy. Actually, that sets a limit as to how well these two things can be simultaneously known. Well, there is an energy-time uncertainty principle, as well. Loosely speaking, this means that energy or particles can come from nothing, which violates conservation of energy. However, they can not exist for very long, and after that time, they must return to nothing. The more energy that comes in one of these quantum fluctuations, the shorter the period of time it can last. And that period of time is very very very short for any particle. By having this time constraint, energy conservation can be violated, but for so little time that it can not be detected, thus no information comes out of it. The only way this can be detected is in how some in! teractions between actual particles occur. But, still, energy and particles are not appearing and persisting.Of course, all of this may be different in extreme cases (like the big bang, etc), but there is no real good theory of what happened then. Everything I said may only apply to the standard universe that we humans experience, and not to very exotic, never observed, systems at the limits of our theory....Show more

Keven Drumgole: I believe that information to energy is by means of mechanical interpretation, in which case would not have a universal law defining it.

Elvin Weichbrodt: too bio freak- your answer is very satisfactory. however, I am not sure whether your answer would imply that energy and matter can be created from information that comes from nothing. if this is not the case, how come? I think you can edit your answer to add informational data.

Janita Tetlow: A law of conservation for information would only pertain to the integrity of the ! data. For example, if Alice, Bob, and Clive are separated significantly! . Alice opens a box to learn what's inside and, then, shares that with Clive and tells him to take it to Bob. On the way, Clive meets his demise. Alice would, of course, still be able to carry the information.