jmf1sh

Former mathematical physicist here. I haven't read the article yet so don't take this comment as a defense nor as a rebuttal, but I just want to point out that your reasons for immediate dismissal are not obviously valid.

- The Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy directly relates information to entropy. There has been an "it from bit" program (and more recently "it from qubit") dating back decades that tries to treat information as somehow fundamental with matter/energy emergent. The jury is still out, but I wouldn't consider it to be particularly controversial (at least not moreso than other speculative theoretical physics).

- To me it seems absolutely physically plausible that cooling a hard drive to absolute zero would destroy its contents. As another example, you can destroy the information contained in DNA at much warmer temperatures than absolute zero. Why would heating it back up restore the information? Most thermodynamic processes are irreversible. And by the way, thermodynamic irreversibility is related to entropy change, which is a measure of information lost.