Physical Meaning of Data

Physical Meaning of Data is an Platonic idea that could be related to physical Church–Turing thesis. The phrase, Data has physical meaning is particularly applicable to the architecture of computers or network of computers. The speed of how data can be transferred and the way how data are being represented determine the boundary of how data could affect the physical world. The intentional act to organize information processing tools, either by human organization or by machine architecture, is considered to be a way to assign physical meaning to data. For example, complex numbers are only required for quantum physics. That implies imaginary numbers are only required to represent the physical meaning of data in quantum physical world.

Relevant lectures

Leonard Susskind in his Oppenheimer Lecture gives a good story about how to assign physical meaning of data that cut across Quantum Mechanics (microscopic phenomenon) and gravity(macroscopic phenomenon).

Historical Document

The first and foremost important document that stated this idea can be associated to Moore's Law. This document is important because it links across socio-technical world, and explicitly stated that the physical size of data has economical and social implications. The other document that also talked about the physical meaning of data is Paul Dirac's book on The Principles of Quantum Mechanics.

Hardware Changes

This video explains how to exploit the physical properties of data.