Nature's book keeping system
pp. 127-135
in: Shyam Wuppuluri, Giancarlo Ghirardi (eds), Space, time and the limits of human understanding, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
Establishing how one should describe and study nature's fundamental degrees of freedom is a notoriously difficult problem. It is tempting to assume that the number of bits (or qubits) needed in a given Planckian 3-volume, or perhaps 2-volume, is a fixed finite number, but this ansatz does not make the problem much easier. We come not even close to solving this problem, but we propose various ingredients in phrasing the questions, possibilities and limitations that may serve as starting points.