I guess it would seem to me that what gets “overwritten” is the (now invalid) knowledge of where Y is, and what it is overwritten with is the new, valid position of it. I’ll have to chew on it for a while.
By the way, sort of unrelated, but I’ve always wondered why gravity acting on things is not considered a loss of entropy. For example I can drop a bowling ball from multiple distances, but it will always end up 0 feet from the ground:
B4 → B0
B3 → B0
B2 → B0
etc.
The only thing I can think of is that, when the ball hits the ground the collision creates enough heat (i.e. entropy) to balance everything out. Is that correct?
Yes, that’s basically correct: the ball ends up at the same place, but differs in another state—velocity—which gives a different result for how much momentum it imparts to the earth, or heat energy it generates through friction, or elastic energy in compressing its foundation.
Btw, note that there is a connection between the energy of a system and the information it stores. Higher energy states are less likely and therefore store more information. (See Academician’s recent post on informativeness in information theory.) Because energy of a state is relative to another, this suggests a research program that breaks down the laws of physics into rules about changes in informational content. I’m still in the process of finding out how much work has been done on this and what’s left to do.
I guess it would seem to me that what gets “overwritten” is the (now invalid) knowledge of where Y is, and what it is overwritten with is the new, valid position of it. I’ll have to chew on it for a while.
By the way, sort of unrelated, but I’ve always wondered why gravity acting on things is not considered a loss of entropy. For example I can drop a bowling ball from multiple distances, but it will always end up 0 feet from the ground:
B4 → B0
B3 → B0
B2 → B0
etc.
The only thing I can think of is that, when the ball hits the ground the collision creates enough heat (i.e. entropy) to balance everything out. Is that correct?
Yes, that’s basically correct: the ball ends up at the same place, but differs in another state—velocity—which gives a different result for how much momentum it imparts to the earth, or heat energy it generates through friction, or elastic energy in compressing its foundation.
Btw, note that there is a connection between the energy of a system and the information it stores. Higher energy states are less likely and therefore store more information. (See Academician’s recent post on informativeness in information theory.) Because energy of a state is relative to another, this suggests a research program that breaks down the laws of physics into rules about changes in informational content. I’m still in the process of finding out how much work has been done on this and what’s left to do.