[eloff]

This idea in physics that information is conserved, neither created nor destroyed, just transformed seems awfully similar to a computer to me. A classical computer is not the right metaphor really when you think of the universe as a possible computational process, but the parallels are striking to me.

[simonh]

I suspect it may be just necessarily true that information is preserved in a consistent universe. I don't know though, maybe someone could come up with a model for a consistent universe with information loss, but it seems to me that would lead to physically possible states that are not derivable from consistent laws of physics.

[causasui]

Physics layman, but I agree as a computer scientist. It also sometimes feels like there are "optimizations", e.g., delayed-choice quantum erasure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser)

I'm open to the idea that it's just me projecting what I understand onto what I don't.

[macrolocal]

Nb. wave function collapse messes with this, and a computer would use something like lazy evaluation to avoid generating the Everettian multiverse.