# The Physical Limits of Communication — or — Why any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from noise

## Abstract

It has been well-known since the pioneering work of Claude Shannon in the 1940s that a message transmitted with optimal efficiency over a channel of limited bandwidth is indistinguishable from random noise to a receiver who is unfamiliar with the language in which the message is written. In this letter we demonstrate an equivalent result about electromagnetic transmissions. We show that when electromagnetic radiation is used as the transmission medium, the most information-efficient format for a given message is indistinguishable from black-body radiation to a receiver who is unfamiliar with that format. The characteristic temperature of the radiation is set by the amount of energy used to make the transmission. If information is not encoded in the direction of the radiation, but only its timing, energy or polarization, then the most efficient format has the form of a one-dimensional black-body spectrum which is easily distinguished from the three-dimensional case.

Shannon’s information theory  considers the set $`\{x_i\}`$ of all possible messages $`x_i`$ which can be transmitted across a “channel” linking a sender to a receiver. In the simplest case the channel is considered to be free of noise, so that each message is received just as it was sent. Shannon demonstrated that the only consistent definition of the amount of information carried by such a channel is

$$S=\underset{i}{}p_i\mathrm{log}p_i,$$
(1)   
where $`p_i`$ is the probability of transmission of the message $`x_i`$. (In evaluating this expression we will take natural logarithms, as is common in statistical mechanics. In information theory logarithms base 2 are the norm, but the difference is only one of a constant factor in $`S`$. Conventionally in statistical mechanics there is also a leading constant $`k`$ in the definition of $`S`$, known as the Boltzmann constant. Here we have set $`k=1`$, with the result that temperatures are measured in units of energy.)

If there are no other constraints, then $`S`$ is maximized when all the $`p_i`$ are equal, i.e., when all messages are transmitted with equal probability. If we transmit a constant stream of information in this way by sending many messages one after another, then the resulting flow of data will appear completely random to anyone who does not know the language that it is written in.

We now consider the corresponding problem for a message sent using electromagnetic radiation. In outline our argument is as follows. We assume that the sender of a radio message has a certain amount of energy available and we ask what is the maximum amount of information that can be sent with that energy. Generically, this is the problem of maximizing the Shannon information, Eq. (1), for an ensemble of bosons (photons in this case) subject to the constraint of fixed average energy. The solution is familiar from statistical physics, since the formula for the Shannon information is identical to that for the thermodynamic entropy of an ensemble. The maximization of entropy for an ensemble of bosons gives rise to the Bose–Einstein statistics and, in the case of electromagnetic waves, to black-body radiation. By an exact analogy we now show that the most information-rich electromagnetic transmission has a spectrum indistinguishable from black-body radiation.

In order to apply Shannon’s theory to electromagnetic radiation we must pose the problem in a form resembling the transmission of information over a channel. To do that, consider the following thought experiment. Suppose we have a closed container or “cavity” with perfectly reflecting walls, which, for reasons which will shortly become clear, we take to be a long tube of constant cross-sectional area $`A_t`$ and length $`\mathrm{}`$. Suppose also that we have the technical wherewithal to set up any electromagnetic “microstate” within this cavity. (The microstates need not be single modes of the cavity; any set of states will work.) Since the walls are perfectly reflecting, this microstate will remain in place indefinitely. We can use the cavity as a communication device. Each possible message $`x_i`$ that we might wish to send is agreed to correspond to one microstate, and we simply pass the entire cavity to the receiver of the message. The information transferred by the electromagnetic radiation stored within is then given by Shannon’s formula with $`p_i`$ being the probability that we put the cavity in microstate $`i`$. (This communication is not the same as a sending a radio message but does have the same information content, as we will demonstrate shortly.)

Now suppose that, as in the case of the simple channel, we wish to transmit a steady stream of information by exchanging a series of such cavities. We assume that the power available to make the transmission is limited—i.e., there is a fixed average energy “budget” $`E`$ which we can spend per message sent—and we ask what is the greatest amount of information that can be transmitted per message. This is given by maximizing Eq. (1) subject to the constraint of fixed average energy, but allowing any number of photons to be present in the cavity. The solution of this maximization problem is well-known  and gives the grand canonical ensemble in which

$$p_i=\frac{\mathrm{exp}(\beta E_i\gamma N_i)}{Z},$$
(2)   
where $`E_i`$ is the energy in microstate $`i`$, $`N_i`$ is the number of photons, $`Z`$ is the grand canonical partition function, and $`\beta `$ and $`\gamma `$ are Lagrange multipliers, usually referred to as the (inverse) temperature and chemical potential respectively. If we now denote the microstates by the numbers of photons $`\{n_k\}`$ in each (non-interacting) single-particle state $`k`$ of the cavity, then it is straightforward to show that the average of any $`n_k`$ over many messages follows the normal Bose–Einstein distribution

$$n_k=\frac{1}{\mathrm{e}^{\beta \epsilon _k}1},$$
(3)   
where $`\epsilon _k`$ is the energy of a photon in state $`k`$ and we have set $`\gamma =0`$ since there is no chemical potential for photons in a vacuum.

Suppose now that, instead of handing over the entire cavity, we remove one of its ends and allow the photons to escape in the form of a message. One should envisage the end of the cavity as being the transmitter of the message, not the cavity itself. The cross-section $`A_t`$ of the cavity is also the area of the transmitter, hence the subscript $`t`$. Usually we will want to direct the message towards a specific receiver. For concreteness we will assume that the receiver is a distance $`d`$ from the end of the cavity and presents some finite area $`A_r`$ to the cavity as depicted in Fig. The Physical Limits of Communication — or — Why any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from noise. Only those photons in the cavity which have their momentum within the correct interval of solid angle will strike the receiver, possibly after reflecting one or more times off the walls of the container. (We use only the forward interval of solid angle, disallowing reflections off the rear wall of the cavity. If we allow such reflections the transmission will convey twice as much information but last twice as long, making the rate of information transfer identical.) Given that our cavity has volume $`V=\mathrm{}A_t`$, the density of single-particle states satisfying this criterion, taking into account both polarizations of the photons, is $`\rho (\epsilon )=2\mathrm{}A_tA_r\epsilon ^2/d^2h^3c^3`$, where $`h`$ is Planck’s constant and $`c`$ is the speed of light. The average energy contained in our message per unit interval of energy is thus

$$I(\epsilon )=\frac{2\mathrm{}A_tA_r}{d^2h^3c^3}\frac{\epsilon ^3}{\mathrm{e}^{\beta \epsilon }1}.$$
(4)   
A spectrum with this functional form for the intensity $`I(\epsilon )`$ is usually referred to as a black-body spectrum. A black-body spectrum is produced by a perfect thermal radiator in equilibrium at temperature $`T=\beta ^1`$, and, to a good approximation, by most astronomical bodies.

In fact there is a small correction to Eq. (4) because photons may be delayed slightly if they have to take a path which reflects off the walls of the cavity. This correction goes inversely as the cosine of the angle subtended by the receiver at the transmitter. Here we have assumed that the distance between transmitter and receiver is large enough that this cosine is well approximated by 1.

Our transmission necessarily contains all the information needed to reconstruct the original microstate of the cavity, and therefore contains the same amount of information as that microstate. Furthermore, no ensemble can exist of messages which originate within a volume less than or equal to that of our cavity and which convey more information per message for the same average energy. If such an ensemble existed, reversing time would allow us to trap messages drawn from that ensemble within a cavity of the same size and create an ensemble of microstates which also had greater information content. This conclusion is forbidden, since we have already shown that the black-body distribution maximizes information content.

Now we send a stream of information in the form of many such messages, each one resulting from one microstate of the cavity. Because of the tubular shape we have chosen for our cavity each message will last a time $`\mathrm{}/c`$ and the transmission will have constant average intensity. The apparent temperature $`T`$ of the transmission is fixed by the size of the energy budget. Calculating the average energy $`E`$ per message from an integral over Eq. (4) and dividing by $`\mathrm{}/c`$, we find that for a transmission with energy budget $`ϵ`$ per unit time the apparent temperature is given by

$$T^4=\frac{15h^3c^2}{2\pi ^4}\frac{d^2}{A_tA_r}ϵ.$$
(5)   
The information transmitted per unit time $`\mathrm{d}S/\mathrm{d}t`$ can be calculated using the formula $`S=\mathrm{log}Z\beta \mathrm{log}Z/\beta `$, noting that $`\mathrm{log}Z/\beta =E`$. The result is

$$\frac{\mathrm{d}S}{\mathrm{d}t}=\frac{8\pi ^4}{45h^3c^2}\frac{A_tA_r}{d^2}T^3=\left[\frac{512\pi ^4}{1215h^3c^2}\frac{A_tA_r}{d^2}ϵ^3\right]^{\frac{1}{4}}.$$
(6)   
This is the greatest possible rate at which information can be transferred by any electromagnetic transmission for a given average power. It depends only on fundamental constants, the areas of the transmitter and receiver, the distance between them, and the average power or equivalently the apparent temperature. For a transmitter and receiver of one square metre each, a metre apart, with an energy budget of $`1\mathrm{Js}^1`$, the information rate is $`1.61\times 10^{21}`$ bits per second. Note that the information rate increases slightly slower than linearly with the power $`ϵ`$ of the transmitter, as $`ϵ^{3/4}`$. It also increases with the area of the transmitter and receiver, so that the best information rate for a given energy budget is achieved for large antennae with low apparent temperatures.

In order to reconstruct the microstate of the original cavity and hence extract the information from a transmission of this kind, we need to have complete information about the photons arriving at our receiver. This means that in addition to energy and polarization information, we need to know the transverse momentum (or transverse position) of each one. In practice, we can at best only detect the transverse components with finite resolution, which places an upper limit on the energy range over which Eq. (4) is valid. The finite size of the receiver places a lower limit on the range. Thus, for a given receiver, the most information-efficient transmission will have a black-body spectrum only between these limits.

In fact, most receivers are not capable of measuring the transverse components at all. Usually we have information about only the energy and timing of arriving photons, and possibly their polarization. In this case Eq. (3) still holds, but Eq. (4) becomes

$$I(\epsilon )=\frac{2\mathrm{}}{hc}\frac{\epsilon }{\mathrm{e}^{\beta \epsilon }1}.$$
(7)   
This is the form which the spectrum of a black body would take in a one-dimensional world, and we refer to it as a “one-dimensional black-body spectrum”. The information transmitted per unit time is

$$\frac{\mathrm{d}S}{\mathrm{d}t}=\frac{2\pi ^2}{3h}T=\left[\frac{4\pi ^2}{3h}ϵ\right]^{\frac{1}{2}}.$$
(8)   
For an energy budget of $`1\mathrm{Js}^1`$, this gives a maximum information rate of $`2.03\times 10^{17}`$ bits per second.

A related issue is the calculation of the most information-efficient broadcast transmission, where a broadcast in this context means a transmission for which we do not know the location or size of the receiver and therefore cannot guarantee that it will receive all, or even most, of the photons transmitted. In this case we again find that the most efficient transmission is one which has the same spectrum as a one-dimensional black body.

To summarize, we have shown that optimizing the information-efficiency of a transmission which employs electromagnetic radiation as the information carrier, with a fixed energy budget per unit time, gives rise to a spectrum of intensities identical to that of black-body radiation. In fact, to an observer who is not familiar with the encoding scheme used, an optimally efficient message of this type will be entirely indistinguishable from naturally occurring black-body radiation. One might be tempted to say that perhaps one could tell the two apart by spotting patterns within particular frequency bands of the message, or by performing some other decomposition of the signal. This however is ruled out by the maximization of the Shannon information; any regularities which would allow one to draw such a distinction are necessarily the result of less than optimal encoding. For the case where the transverse momentum of photons is not used to encode information, or for broadcast transmissions, the spectrum is indistinguishable from that of a one-dimensional black body. We have also shown that the characteristic temperature of the message is simply related to the energy used to send it, and we have derived an upper limit on the rate at which information can be transmitted in both cases.

We end with some discussion and speculations. First, we should point out that the ideas outlined here constitute only a thought experiment. By a sequence of deductions we have placed an upper limit on the information efficiency of electromagnetic transmissions, but we have not shown how to achieve that upper limit. Second, we speculate that results similar to those presented here may apply to transmissions using other radiative media as well. Since many natural processes maximize the Gibbs–Boltzmann entropy, they should give rise to spectra indistinguishable from optimally efficient transmissions. For instance, if we had a transmitter that can emit any type of particle (rather than just photons), it seems plausible that the optimal spectrum of particle types and energies would be that of Hawking black-hole radiation .