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Erh....... What's the argument here?

Put in mind my BSc was in physics.

Uh oh, I'm too scared now...

There's two ways to get to it. One is probabilistic and I got it from thinking about probabilities in bitcoin hashing, and that's by far the more interesting way to get there, but also I haven't thought about it in a long time, so I don't think can do it justice now.

The other is just an analogy with data compression in computers, and how in a game you impose limits on things like speed and view distance so your graphics card doesn't freeze up or melt. If you start with the position that there's a finite amount if data in a given space, then you get all sorts of cool ideas, like an equivalence between data density per volume and matter density, as in the closeness of atoms to each other. I feel like that's a reasonable equivalency, but I wouldn't want to posit exactly how much information is possible per volume, since it could be the case that a thing like an atom or a wave is only a compression of data, and only meaningful to our consciousness, and may look entirely different when "unzipped." But the very simplest way to say it is, speed of one thing relative to another is information, and if there's a limit on that relative speed, which cannot be broken (but interestingly can be massaged), then the limit may actually constitute a file size limit for whatever contains this entire frame.

And if that made no sense, I don't blame you!

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Discussion

Rush 4mo ago

Hmmmm.. I read it a couple of times to wrap my head around what you're saying. So, what you're saying is that since there is a limit on the speed of the transfer of information, then that's the ultimate limit for any file transfer. Correct?

Well, if that's the case, then you're not too far from physics says. So, for example, if, for whatever reason, the sun just vanishes into nothingness, the we'll keep seeing it for 8.5 minutes and we won't know about it at all. 8.5 minutes later *poof* the world goes dark and we're flung onto a tangent to the orbit on a straight line until some other big celestial body affects us. So, if you're looking from a birdseye view from way above, you'll see the sun vanish, then all the planet sequentially leave their orbits, not all at the same time. That's the speed of information right there.

So yes, the file transfer that contains the fact that the sun with all its mass had vanished runs at the speed of light. But that's an unrealistic scenario. So, maybe because the real information transfer that ensues because the sun suddenly vanished can't be transferred at the speed of light for the world to be affected. The information there is bigger than a file transfer at the speed of light. Maybe that's why it never happens. 🤔