Une expérience a été conçue qui pourrait confirmer le cinquième état de la matière dans l’univers – et changer la physique telle que nous la connaissons. Si elle s’avérait correcte, elle montrerait que l’information est la cinquième forme de matière, à côté des solides, des liquides, des gaz et du plasma. En fait, l’information pourrait être la matière noire insaisissable qui constitue près d’un tiers de l’univers.
Une nouvelle expérience pourrait confirmer l’existence du cinquième élément
Une expérience qui pourrait confirmer le cinquième état de la matière dans l’univers – et changer la physique telle que nous la connaissons – a été publiée dans un nouveau document de recherche du University of Portsmouth in England.
Dr. Melvin Vopson, a physicist, has already published findings indicating that information has mass and that all elementary particles, the universe’s smallest known building blocks, store information about themselves, similar to the way humans have DNA.
Now he has designed an experiment — which if proved correct — means he will have discovered that information is the fifth form of matter, alongside solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.
Dr. Vopson said: “This would be a eureka moment because it would change physics as we know it and expand our understanding of the universe. But it wouldn’t conflict with any of the existing laws of physics.
“It doesn’t contradict quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, thermodynamics, or classical mechanics. All it does is complement physics with something new and incredibly exciting.”
Dr. Vopson’s previous research suggests that information is the fundamental building block of the universe and has physical mass.
He even claims that information could be the elusive dark matter that makes up almost a third of the universe.
He said: “If we assume that information is physical and has mass, and that elementary particles have a DNA of information about themselves, how can we prove it? My latest paper is about putting these theories to the test so they can be taken seriously by the scientific community.”
Dr. Vopson’s experiment proposes how to detect and measure the information in an elementary particle by using particle-antiparticle collision.
He said: “The information in an electron is 22 million times smaller than the mass of it, but we can measure the information content by erasing it.
“We know that when you collide a particle of matter with a particle of antimatter, they annihilate each other. And the information from the particle has to go somewhere when it’s annihilated.”
The annihilation process converts all the remaining mass of the particles into energy, typically gamma photons. Any particles containing information are converted into low-energy infrared photons.
In the study, Dr. Vopson predicts the exact energy of the infrared photons resulting from erasing the information.
Dr. Vopson believes his work could demonstrate how information is a key component of everything in the universe and a new field of physics research could emerge.
The paper is published in the journal AIP Advances.
Reference: “Experimental protocol for testing the mass–energy–information equivalence principle” by Melvin M. Vopson, 4 March 2022, AIP Advances.
DOI: 10.1063/5.0087175
