[varsigma (OP)]

What else they should teach you at primary school is about economy and efficiency.
They should teach you about how all the energy we use is largely due to the sun's radiation.

And about how we use energy at different scales, and the scale of information processing related to the distribution and conversion of energy is at the low end of the scale. It might be a convenient fiction but it seems to be a thing we need, both the idea and the thing itself, whatever that is. Something physical, perhaps. Why I can say that is because physics is both theoretical and practical.

I don't think anyone has managed to show we don't need this idea of energy, as a kind of source of information, or information loss, which arguably still means there is such a thing as thermodynamic or thermal information. This is just something you can postulate as a change in entropy that makes a system distinguishable from its environment, and call it say, heat information.

Here I'm underlining that information is what we say it is, but it has to be recognizable--a pattern that corresponds to a particular configuration of matter. A determinate system of particles.
Such as the ones that form the text in this sentence.

[alancalverd]

The concept of energy is certainly vital but it needs to be taught by people who understand physics and teaching, not by the unemployables who devise the National Curriculum.

IIRC we were taught 70 years ago that almost all the energy we use comes from the sun. The teaching process is simple enough: sunlight makes the grass grow, and so forth..... You don't have to use the plants immediately: we store firewood, and coal and oil are the oxidisable residue of things that lived a long time ago. And there it is: solar, potential, chemical, kinetic, thermal: what connects them all? A conserved quantity.

It was all pretty obvious in the days of steam engines: coal, heat, useful work. Less so when the conversion of chemical to electrical energy takes place hundreds of miles away, but you can't have fire and boiling water in a modern classroom in case you offend any Zoroastrians or commit the sin of making carbon dioxide in public.

It would be fun to teach entropy at a primary level - something to think about!

[paul cotter]

Is the ongoing dumbing down of education an example of the increasing entropy of the universe?!!

[Bored chemist]

but the National Curriculum used to require primary school teachers to establish that "Energy is the 'go' of things"

That phrase is sometimes attributed to J C Maxwell.
Not sure he worked for the National Curriculum.

[alancalverd]

Maybe not, but it was quoted in the NC even if they didn't coin it.  Maybe that's why so many people still think about aether - the Dept of Education's only physics textbook is 100 years out of date!

[geordief]

Maybe not, but it was quoted in the NC even if they didn't coin it.  Maybe that's why so many people still think about aether - the Dept of Education's only physics textbook is 100 years out of date!

With all the water vapour  out there it can't be long before they track down the aether.

https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2021/01/20/scientists-have-found-more-water-in-space-than-they-ever-knew-possible/39771/#:~:text=The%20cloud%20of%20water%20in,accounting%20for%20its%20remarkable%20size.&text=The%20gas%20cloud's%20higher%20temperature,in%20space%20is%20constantly%20heated.

[paul cotter]

Aether does not exist.

[geordief]

Aether does not exist.

'twas  said in jest(not joust).

[Zer0]

Aether does not exist.

'twas  said in jest(not joust).

@Gee

I Wish you'd speak your mind a bit more Often.
You seem to Know alot of Stuff.
Others could Benefit from it.

ps - it can't always be take, take n take...sumtims U gotta Give!

[varsigma (OP)]

An update on my ideas.

Thanks to some stuff I learned about image compression I can talk about an interference pattern of dots as an uncompressed image. One way to compress it is by making one dimension, say the vertical, redundant. So all the dots lie on the same horizontal line. Does that change the number of dots needed to see a pattern?

This horizontal line can be anywhere, and in a sense, its position represents another redundancy. All an algorithm needs is the 'x-address' of each dot.

[alancalverd]

Depends on the pattern, and what you want to interpret from it.

A Laue x-ray diffraction pattern is essentially a 2-dimensional inverse transform of the structure of a single crystal, and both x and y, or more correctly r and θ, of each spot are required to elucidate the structure. Powder diffraction, however, produces essentially circularly symmetric interference so only one dimension is relevant. [Sort of. In fact the intensity of each spot or line is also important to identify its source, so they are actually "n + 1" dimensional.]

Note that there is a difference between seeing a pattern and determining one. The human (and probably most animal) brain is very adept at spotting geometric patterns where none exist. One annoying case is the "ring artefact" that lots of folk report inside a CT scan image of an entirely uniform cylindrical noise source - it seems to derive from  the "clue" of the circular boundary. My favorite example is to ask a witness, who claims to have spotted a pattern in someone's behavior,  "1,3,5,7, what is the next number?" "Obviously, 9" "Are you sure it's not 11?" 

[varsigma (OP)]

The heuristic I'm using is that, given a pattern from a double-slit 'interaction', that is, given that interference is detected, there is a symmetry in that, along any vertical scan line there should be a regular (semi-regular ?) distribution of dots.

Even if there isn't, you need a horizontal scan to see the pattern, which alternates in a regular way. An algorithm could look for this regular alternating pattern and I think, detect interference with a smaller number of dots. Someone needs to do the experiment, or the analysis of existing experimental data.

I maintain that a two-dimensional screen which is the 'measurement space' for double-slit experiments has one redundant degree of freedom in the output, and the significance of this fact speaks to the encoding of information.

[alancalverd]

The heuristic I'm using is that, given a pattern from a double-slit 'interaction', that is, given that interference is detected, there is a symmetry in that, along any vertical scan line there should be a regular (semi-regular ?) distribution of dots.

No.
Assuming the slits are vertical, the horizontal distribution of the interference pattern is the product of the random distribution of photons with the transform of the slits. The vertical distribution of photons in any one line is entirely  random.

So you will see something like a bell curve of intensity in either direction, but  modulated by a pattern only along the horizontal axis.