Ignorance Composes Our Reality

Meanwhile, quantum information theorists have taken a different approach to handling subjectivity. They are treating information as a resource that observers can use to interact with a system that’s increasingly blending together with its environment. For a supercomputer with unlimited power that could track the exact state of every particle in the universe, entropy would always remain constant — since no information would be lost — and time would cease to flow. But observers with finite computational resources such as ourselves always have to contend with a coarse-grained picture of reality. We can’t keep track of the motion of all the air molecules in a room, so we take averages in the form of temperature and pressure. We progressively lose track of microscopic details as systems evolve into more probable states, and this relentless trend materializes as the flow of time. “The time of physics is, ultimately, the expression of our ignorance of the world,” Rovelli wrote. Ignorance composes our reality.