Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, PhD, is challenged to explain the concept of dimensions to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert.
Physicist Explains Dimensions in 5 Levels of Difficulty

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Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, PhD, is challenged to explain the concept of dimensions to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert.
I’ve often thought that the universe itself is incapable of storing a perfect memory of anything more than a tiny percentage of its contents–some laughably small fraction of its whole. Even with an amazingly efficient system, how much information could really be stored about what’s transpired in the past?
By this I mean: I’d like to know, for example, which oceans the molecule of water in my glass has been immersed in, which algae used it as part of their metabolic processes, which comet deposited it onto the proto earth, which nuclear furnace generated the oxygen that went into its formation, etc.
I’d like to know this for as much of the universe as possible, in as much detail as possible. How much of the universe would be required, and how much information could you store?
Here are my thoughts on how to solve this. Considering:
The atom itself isn’t even atomic, as there are quarks and other strange particles, but you get the idea of “atom” for the thought experiment.
This would be a reading and writing mechanism, again a few orders of magnitude per atom that somehow encodes information about the ones you’re observing. (I.e., computer memory requires some 1e25 atoms (500g of silicon) to manipulate 8e12 bits of information (1 TB)–criminally inefficient.)
Thus in the best-case scenario, you’re talking about an encoding inefficiency that necessitates only being able to record the state of some smaller subsection of the rest of the universe, and that would require the entire rest of the universe being dedicated to that task, which is presumably unlikely.