Information: The Base Layer of Reality
In quantum mechanics, information isn't just a description of what exists – it seems to be what exists.
Delete everything from your computer's hard drive, and something remarkable happens: it becomes lighter. The change is minuscule – about a billionth of a billionth of a gram – but it's real. Your computer physically loses mass when you erase its data. This seemingly impossible fact points to something profound about the nature of our universe: information isn't just abstract. It's physical. And it might be more fundamental than matter or energy themselves.
This idea is revolutionizing physics. Leading scientists are increasingly convinced that information could be the basic ingredient from which everything else – particles, fields, forces, even space and time themselves – emerges.
In other words, we might be living in a universe made not of stuff, but of information.
When Information Gets Physical
Most of us think of information as something abstract – existing in our minds or computers but not "real" in the same way that a rock or a star is real. But the deeper physicists dig into the nature of reality, the more this distinction breaks down.
Consider a black hole. These cosmic behemoths follow strict rules about information. The amount of information a black hole can contain is proportional to its surface area – try to add more information than this limit allows, and the black hole must grow larger. Information, in other words, takes up physical space and has physical consequences. It's as real as anything can be.
The Hidden Information All Around Us
This connection between information and physical reality isn't limited to exotic objects like black holes. It's present in the everyday world, hiding in plain sight. What we experience as temperature, for instance, is really just information about how fast atoms are moving. Temperature isn't a "thing" – it's information about things.
This pattern appears everywhere we look. The hardness of a diamond? That's information about how its atoms are bonded together. The color of a sunset? Information about the frequencies of light waves. Even mass itself might be, at its heart, information about how objects interact with fundamental fields that permeate the universe.
As physicist John Wheeler famously suggested, reality might be "information all the way down." The more we learn about the universe, the more this radical idea seems to make sense.
The Quantum World: Information Takes Center Stage
When we dive into the quantum realm, the connection between information and reality becomes even stranger – and more fundamental. In quantum mechanics, information isn't just a description of what exists. In many ways, it seems to be what exists.
Take quantum entanglement, one of the most profound discoveries in physics. When particles become entangled, they share information instantaneously across any distance. Einstein called this "spooky action at a distance," but modern physicists are realizing it's not really action at all – it's information defining reality itself.
This realization has led to a modern update to perhaps the most famous equation in physics. Everyone knows Einstein's E = mc². But physicist Seth Lloyd suggests a crucial addition: E = mc² = i, where i represents information. Mass, energy, and information might be three faces of the same underlying reality.
The Universe's Missing Information
To understand how deeply information shapes our reality, we need to talk about entropy – often described as a measure of disorder in the universe. But entropy isn't really about disorder. It's about information – specifically, missing information.
Imagine watching an ice cube melt into a puddle. In the ice cube, we know where every water molecule roughly is – they're locked into a crystalline structure. As the ice melts, we lose this information. The molecules could be anywhere in the puddle. This loss of information is what we experience as entropy increasing. The mathematics of entropy, developed by physicists like Ludwig Boltzmann and later refined by Claude Shannon, is literally the mathematics of information.
Weaving Space from Information
Perhaps the most radical implication of information-based physics is that space itself might emerge from pure information. It sounds impossible, but evidence is mounting. The holographic principle suggests that the information content of any region of space can be described by information on its boundary – as if our three-dimensional reality were projected from a two-dimensional surface of pure information.
This isn't just theoretical speculation. The way space behaves, especially near black holes and in quantum experiments, makes more sense if space emerges from patterns of information rather than existing as a fundamental entity. We might be living in a reality that's more like a cosmic computer than a collection of particles and forces.
The Mind in an Information Universe
This perspective raises fascinating questions about consciousness. If reality is built from information, what role does consciousness play? Some scientists suggest that consciousness might be a fundamental property of information processing itself. Every conscious experience involves information processing, after all. Perhaps consciousness is what information feels like "from the inside."
These ideas are leading to practical advances in technology, from quantum computing to new approaches in artificial intelligence. If information is fundamental, understanding how it behaves could be key to our technological future.
Living in an Information Reality
Understanding reality as information doesn't make it any less real or magical. Instead, it reveals a deeper magic: the power of information to create and define reality itself. Everything we do – every thought, every action – creates and processes information, literally shaping the informational fabric of reality.
As we probe deeper into nature's mysteries, we're discovering that information isn't just about something – it is something. It has weight, takes up space, and might be the fundamental building block of everything we know.
The next time you delete a file from your computer, remember: you're not just removing abstract data. You're participating in the fundamental physics of information, tweaking the very fabric of reality itself. In an information universe, every bit counts – literally.
Reality might ultimately lead us not to particles, forces, or strings, but to information – the ultimate building block of everything that exists. And that might be the most profound discovery of all.
Learn more in this paper.