| I can't really speak for Dewey, but the role and nature of information strikes me as an excellent crossover point for librarians and quantum physicists. The number of people who earn a PhD in physics every year is only in the thousands worldwide, and I suspect that it tends to be such a diverse bunch that few could shape the contenders ahead of time. The incredibly wide ranging interests of physicists like Feynman and Gell-Mann makes me wonder if librarianship would be the one profession above all others where diversity of experience and study would have the most solid foundation, but it's just too hard to know where the line between a person's problem-solving abilities and the unique quirks associated with individuals becomes crossed.
To me, one of the most fantastic parts of quantum physics is that every electron in the universe is identical, with the same mass, charge, total spin, and so on, ditto for up and down quarks, photons, and every other particle species. The distinguishing aspects of particles in the same species are things like the direction of spins, positioning, and attributes like velocities and energies. Some physicists would characterize these features of particles as a form of information, in a sense, with information becoming the most important layer of reality. Briane Greene talks about what would happen if someone reconstructed the billion, billion, billion and more particles in a DeLorean. What would distinguish it, if anything, from the original? It's a very intriguing notion given that physicists have managed to use quantum entanglement to teleport photons, and, in some ways, it's the information about the quantum object that is the critical enabler in making the object reappear in another location. If quantum teleportion could be carried out without any classical techniques, imagine putting "receiving" and "sending" twin teleporters on a spaceship and sending it at high speeds on trips outside the planet. If one of your twin teleporter devices on earth was plugged into Newsworld or CNN, and one of the teleporters on the spaceship was responsible for sending back what the other received, the time on the spaceship, if the spaceship could achieve high enough speeds, would slow down significantly. What would be transmitted back to earth might, in turn, reflect the spaceship's own time and literally be a way to peek into the future. I am purposely going out into pretty fantastic and shaky territory here, but there could be a lot of information policy and information challenges given the kind of possibilities that quantum physics currently hints at. The point is that information may really be what defines our existence, and librarians have spent centuries developing tools and mental models to deal with information growth and flow. So I think some cross-discipline dialogue on information would be a great achievement, and I suspect it is already occurring. |
