It from bit

 "It is not unreasonable to imagine that information sits at the core of physics, just as it sits at the core of a computer. 

It from bit. Otherwise put, every 'it'—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. 'It from bit' symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe."                                                              

- John Archibald Wheeler

Having just finished James Gleick's The Information, and since we've spent so much time on cosmology, I thought I'd try to make a brief post encapsulating one of the more esoteric views of the universe - the digital view. There's a big debate in physics as to whether or not reality is digital or analog. Simply put, is the universe continuous, or can it be divided up, or sampled, into discrete bits. A growing number of physicists and philosophers have taken the novel approach towards conceptualizing the universe as information, usually leaning toward the discrete view. It's not just that information and its transmission is important in the universe - it's that that is the purpose of the universe. 

This is a radical and pretty mind-blowing idea that is self-consistent and probably just as valid as any other worldview when it comes to the purpose of the universe, or why we are here - after all these are mainly philosophical questions. The suggestion is that all of the processes in the universe are designed to preserve and pass on information. At a very basic level information is preserved about everything that has ever happened in our universe. Astronomers and cosmologists study the early history of our universe by examining the imprint of those early times and events upon the world around us today, the cosmic microwave background, light emitted from extremely distant sources, extremely long ago. As discussed in the previous post, the entire history of the motion of the particles of the universe is preserved in the current motion and direction of those particles. If one were to reverse their positions and momentums, one could (theoretically) construct a perfect picture of the past by rewinding everything to some previous point simply by following Newton's laws in reverse. The information about a star going supernova is transmitted via light (photons) and the momentum of heavier elements ejected from it's core to leave its imprint on the neighboring parts of the universe. What Wheeler is getting at is that every particle, and every property of a particle is a physical manifestation of information no different from a 1 or a 0 in a binary code that transmits instructions in an algorithm to the next process. Spin up, spin down, polarity, left-handed, right-handed, charge - it's all just information contained in something and that information is transferred and exchanged when particles come in contact with one another. This information is processed, absorbed by other parts of the universe, molded, shaped, used to create new processes or simply observed and wondered at by groups of particles we call sentient life. 

And what is life? Life, as Richard Dawkins argues in The Selfish Gene, is nothing more than a vehicle for the preservation of genetic information. Complex, macroscopic, multi-cellular life serves the all powerful genetic code imprinted on our DNA, a chemical construct at its most basic level, to replicate itself and to transmit the information of its existence, its chemical arrangement, into the future. In short, life may exist in the information-theoretic model, as a means by which chemical components make copies of themselves like files that automatically copy on your computer. Yet it can be even more abstract than that. Life itself can be made to serve ideas, information in its truest sense. Buried within The Selfish Gene, is a chapter in which Dawkins coined a term popular on the internet today: memes.

From Wikipedia: "A meme ( /ˈmiːm/) is an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. While genes transmit biological information, memes are said to transmit ideas and belief information. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures. Memes can be viewed as purely informational, having no real physical existence. It can be conceptual: the notion of love, for example, musical or artistic, a composition by Asian Kung-Fu Generation. What is music anyway? Are the notes on a piece of paper music? Are the instruments? Is the recording of a song, the actual song? It's an idea - yet it's an idea that lives, almost akin to a virus, by spreading from host mind to host mind through a variety of mediums from spoken word to the internet via Youtube. Life serves these ideas by channeling them and transmitting them - passing them on. And this isn't an anthropocentric view either. The idea of using tools for example and even some basic cultural behavior, traditions, for lack of a better word, can be seen being passed on in primates as well. Species specific hunting techniques can be learned in a group setting, particularly among the brighter of Earth's inhabitants, like Dolphins.

Moreover, ideas, even purely abstract ones (communism?) do indeed have a physical existence in the universe. The idea of communism is stored electrochemically in the memory of human brains, on pages in books, on bits of magnetic tape on hard drives and these ideas feed off one another, grow in complexity and evolve as the universe does.

We've left the realm of physics here and strayed into philosophy, but it's an interesting idea and one well-worth pursuing. Perhaps the most fundamental, basic interactions and explanations of what the universe is made of and why it exists will forever be beyond our reach if we keep looking for physical or chemical explanations like String Theory. Perhaps, strings exist only as an idea, and the idea itself is enough to give rise to the entirety of the universe. I know, I'm really pushing it here. Or am I? Nobel prize winning scientist George Wald once said, "It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms." Or, if you prefer Neils Bohr's more succinct version, "A physicist is just an atoms way of looking at itself." Either way you parse it, both scientists seemed to be way ahead of the information revolution in saying that the universe is information and we are merely the way that the universe thinks about (or processes) itself. What would the universe be doing if sentient life weren't around to experience it? Tree falling in the woods anyone?