Johan Swanepoel/Alamy
It is a rule of physics that information can’t disappear. So what happens to the information in my brain when I die?
Lewis O’Shaughnessy Nottingham, UK
Physics tells us that while the physical structures that encode information can never be destroyed, they can be altered. Importantly, they can be changed in such a way that it is practically impossible to recover the information, even though it remains a technical possibility.
If you ran a computer’s hard drive through an industrial shredder several times over, for example, it would theoretically be possible to stick every fragment back together in exactly the same way as before, although such…
