I wouldn't. It's nice to show these effects in practice. In fact, I would have added a part 1.5 that gave theoretical bounds for how much heat can be dissipated from a volume that contains N bits.
Heat dissipation is proportional to the surface area, so this suggests a reason that information density is (physically) bound by surface area, rather than volume.
Another factor that gives the same limit in theory is gravity. If you have a volume of space and start shoving hard drives in it, eventually the hard drives will collapse into a black hole, and your information density is limited by the surface area of the black hole—again, giving you O(R^2) bits of storage for a volume with radius R.
Interesting. Perhaps a stupid question but is this somehow related to the recently proposed theory which says that the universe is essentially a hologram?
One way it's related: if a volume's information only depends on its surface area, then you can imagine the volume is really just a hologram with the same number of bits, and the bits are directly embedded on the surface of that hologram.
How are those counterexamples? I'm not talking about abstract mathematical geometry, I'm talking about actual physics. A paper that says "just drill infinite holes in a cube" isn't relevant here.
Stuffing hard drives together until they form a perfect Schwartzchild black hole is hardly "actual physics", so I posited we're long into abstract constructs giving theoretical upper bounds.
