7 ms·
There is such a limit to areal density. The math involved dives into entropy and the planck length, but the short answer is that any information at a quantum le
by biggerfisch 8y ago
There is such a limit to areal density. The math involved dives into entropy and the planck length, but the short answer is that any information at a quantum level must be quantized in some form and the smallest possible quantization is the planck length squared, called the "planck area".
reference: https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/2283 https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/2283
- bsamuels 8y agothis is probably a silly question, but why isnt the smallest possible quantization just planck length, or planck length cubed?
- eximius 8y agoI think they're talking about _area_ specifically.
- smilliken 8y agoThe idea is that our universe has three spatial dimensions, but only two are needed to represent a given volume of space. All the information is on the boundary surface. In other words, we live in a hologram.
- spiralx 8y agoThe holographic principle says that all of the information required to represent a 3-D volume is encoded on the 2-D surface of its boundary i.e. in one sense there is no difference between e.g. a black hole and its surface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
- spiralx 8y agoIt's actually 2x2 Planck lengths per bit, so 4 Planck areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound