Information cannot be destroyed, so what happens to our minds when we die?

nah mate

Right, so in other words, you're a chimp in shoes who didn't understand a word I just wrote.

The third law of thermodynamics states: "The entropy of a system at absolute zero is typically zero, and in all cases is determined only by the number of different ground states it has."

The time evolution of a physical system is effected by applying some transformation to the state of the system at a given moment, such that, if we have a state describable by some string x at a given point in time, the state at a later point in time will be described by a certain function f(x) of that state. If now there is a function f^-1 we can apply to that evolved state to again get out the state x, i.e. if f^-1(f(x)) = x, no information has been lost.

Information cannot be destroyed.

Of course I did, but you're just wrong. When we die our minds are destroyed and so any information goes with them. What do you think happens, the information flies away into someone else's brain?

If I am so plainly wrong why not address the content of my post and demonstrate the flaws in my argument?

In any case, the vast majority of physicists, including Susskind and Hawkins, agree that information cannot be destroyed. Unless you have a very compelling reason to think otherwise which you'd like to share, I see no reason for me to reconsider my position.

I just smashed a battery with a hammer.

If I am so plainly wrong why not address the content of my post and demonstrate the flaws in my argument?

In any case, the vast majority of physicists, including Susskind and Hawkins, agree that information cannot be destroyed. Unless you have a very compelling reason to think otherwise which you'd like to share, I see no reason for me to reconsider my position.

Of course I did, but you're just wrong. When we die our minds are destroyed and so any information goes with them. What do you think happens, the information flies away into someone else's brain?

Might be a better idea to smash an external hard drive

It has my essay on it tho.

I suppose, say if you burned a book, if someone understood wind and smoke and all the forces at work, they could re construct the information from the location of the various particles. So the informations not destroyed but is "lost" because nobody could read it.

Doesn't that suppose information=matter=energy though?

I mean even if we could get back all the matter that made up the book we'd still need a copy to assemble the contents in the right order - otherwise it'd just be pages of gibberish.

The third law of thermodynamics states: "The entropy of a system at absolute zero is typically zero, and in all cases is determined only by the number of different ground states it has."

The time evolution of a physical system is effected by applying some transformation to the state of the system at a given moment, such that, if we have a state describable by some string x at a given point in time, the state at a later point in time will be described by a certain function f(x) of that state. If now there is a function f^-1 we can apply to that evolved state to again get out the state x, i.e. if f^-1(f(x)) = x, no information has been lost.

Information cannot be destroyed.

If that's the case sod revising, I'll just hang around hospitals the week before my exam

I'm a physics noob but why are you assuming that there is such a function f^-1? Many processes (basically all, in reality) are thermodynamically irreversible and produce entropy, so by definition there cannot be such an inverse function.

The microstate of a system is ultimately given by its quantum mechanical description, i.e. something like a wave function, or a state vector (or, more accurately, an equivalence class thereof) in a Hilbert space. The important feature of quantum mechanics then is that time evolution is unitary, i.e. the transformation of a state at some time into the state at a later time is effected by some quantity U, for which there always exists a quantity U* such that U*U = 1, where 1 is the identity transformation, i.e. the transformation that 'does nothing'. So that if the state of the system is described by ψ, at a later time it will be described by φ = Uψ, and there exists U* such that U*φ = U*Uψ = 1ψ = ψ, i.e. the original state can always be recovered.