Which Law of Computer Science is: "Information cannot exist apart from its carrier"?

After reading the page "Laws of Computer Science and Programming" and not finding this law, can anyone tell me what this law is?

The point of the law is that the carrier IS the information. In other words, you cannot divide the information on a HDD from the molecular structure of the HDD. You cannot开发者_JS百科 divide the information provided by a statue from the shape and physical structure of the statue. You cannot divide the information in your head from the physical structure of the neurons in your brain where that information is stored.

I read the law many years ago, but cannot track it down on the Internet. Can you please help?

The point is you can't store information unless it is encoded. To have it encoded you need an encoding scheme and a carrier to store the encoding result on. Of course you can encode and send the result to /dev/null, but then you no longer have the result.

That "law" seems poorly thought out at best - you can indeed divide the information from its carrier. Consider a hard drive and a flash drive, formatted in different filesystems, but both containing exactly exactly one jpeg file. Both are from the same original, a photograph of the Mona Lisa, but have been resampled and are in no way identical on a binary level. What do they have in common?

According to this law, absolutely nothing.

You probably can't find it because I expect it isn't an actual law - somebody may have thought it up and thought it was clever and written it somewhere which you may have subsequently read.

If I am wrong and have just made an ass of myself please correct me.

Edit: also
"you cannot divide the information on a HDD from the molecular structure of the HDD"

Then how exactly does one copy data from one HDD to another without physically moving the molecular structure? Surely the act of merely reading the data performs this impossible task. What you may have been looking for is that information cannot exist without some kind of carrier.