Estimation of the information contained in the visible matter of the universe

TL;DR

This paper uses Shannon's information theory to estimate the total information stored in all visible matter of the universe, quantifying the information content per particle and overall.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed formula to estimate the universe's total particle count and calculates the information each particle contains, providing a quantitative measure of the universe's information capacity.

Findings

Each particle contains approximately 1.509 bits of information.

The total information in the observable universe is about 6 x 10^80 bits.

The approach links particle count with information theory to quantify cosmic information.

Abstract

The information capacity of the universe has been a topic of great debate since 1970s, and continues to stimulate multiple branches of physics research. Here we used Shannon's information theory to estimate the amount of encoded information in all the visible matter in the universe. We achieved this by deriving a detailed formula estimating the total number of particles in the observable universe, known as the Eddington number, and by estimating the amount of information stored by each particle about itself. We determined that each particle in the observable universe contains 1.509 bits of information and there are 6 * 10 to power 80 bits of information stored in all the matter particles of the observable universe.