POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : What is the Universe made of? : What is the Universe made of? Server Time
3 Sep 2024 15:12:49 EDT (-0400)
  What is the Universe made of?  
From: Warp
Date: 2 Nov 2010 15:59:28
Message: <4cd06da0@news.povray.org>
I read some discussion where it was mentioned something along the lines
that everything in the Universe is energy (the context being that there's
nothing else in the Universe than energy).

  This got me thinking: The entire Universe is not pure energy. There are
things that are *not* energy. So what are these things?

  For one, timespace, ie. the geometry of the Universe is not energy.
It's the "container" where the energy in the Universe resides, in other
words it *contains* energy, it's not energy in itself.

  But are there other things in this Universe which are not energy?

  What about the four fundamental interactions? Are they energy, or are
they some property of the Universe distinct from energy? (These fundamental
interactions might not *appear* at all if there were no energy in the
Universe, but that doesn't mean that the fundamental interactions *are*
energy, only that they *act* on energy.)

  How about information? Energy can be arranged such that one can define
the amount of information contained in a system because of that arrangment
("information" is actually a pretty well-defined concept of physics).
Without energy there couldn't be information, but that doesn't mean that
information is energy, only that energy is used to construct information.
Information is certainly a physical entity because it can produce causality
chains and such. (Another point which would indicate that information is not
energy is that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but information can.)

  What else?

-- 
                                                          - Warp


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