Quantum Measurement, Information, and Time

This essay is an ambitious attempt to resolve a well-known physics paradox by introducing a concept that most physicists deny — that is, the existence of information in the abstract, independent of any physical medium like a computer chip or a brain. The paradox is called “the arrow of time”. The project of modern physics is to understand large-scale phenomena in terms of the interactions among sub-atomic particles. The paradox arises from the fact that in everyday life, time is a one-way street. We remember the past, but not the future. Things spontaneously break or fall apart; they never spontaneously repair themselves or assemble into new structures. But the laws governing sub-atomic particles are entirely time-symmetric. A movie of two particles colliding and bouncing off each other (or the quantum equivalent) can be run forward or backward, and you would never know the difference. So the paradox is this: How can macroscopic physics that goes one-way only emerge from sub-atomic particle dynamics that is indifferent to the direction of time? To resolve this paradox, I am proposing that information has its own existence, and that as conscious beings the world over make their observations, the sum total of information is…