What is "information"?

[Throckmorton]

I was watching a documentary on the Hawking Paradox, and they kept talking about how information is destroyed by a black hole. I don't understand what that means. As far as I know, information only exists when some arrangement of atoms is understood to mean something by a creature's brain, or encoded in a way that another brain can understand it.

 

[Nathelion]

In information theory, the information is there regardless of if someone is reading it or not. This is a similar thread that was going around a while ago:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...ing+information+theory

 

[Throckmorton]

Thanks. Your post in that thread shed some light on it. Is that theory well accepted, or proven? I think Star Trek teleporters work by storing the quantum state of each particle, but I didn't realize that was based so much on real science.