Editing Holographic principle (section)

===Energy, matter, and information equivalence===

Shannon's efforts to find a way to quantify the information contained in, for example, a telegraph message, led him unexpectedly to a formula with the same form as [[Boltzmann's entropy formula|Boltzmann's]]. In an article in the August 2003 issue of ''Scientific American'' titled "Information in the Holographic Universe", Bekenstein summarizes that "Thermodynamic entropy and Shannon entropy are conceptually equivalent: the number of arrangements that are counted by Boltzmann entropy reflects the amount of Shannon information one would need to implement any particular arrangement" of matter and energy. The only salient difference between the thermodynamic entropy of physics and Shannon's entropy of information is in the units of measure; the former is expressed in units of energy divided by temperature, the latter in essentially dimensionless "bits" of information.

The holographic principle states that the entropy of ordinary mass (not just black holes) is also proportional to surface area and not volume; that volume itself is illusory and the universe is really a [[hologram]] which is [[isomorphism|isomorphic]] to the information "inscribed" on the surface of its boundary.<ref name="sciam2003"/>