CONCEPT
Information as the Currency of Reality
John Wheeler's 'it from bit' thesis—that information is not a byproduct of matter but the fundamental substance from which matter is built—converting every information-processing system into an expression of the universe's deepest architecture.
The informational view of reality holds that information is more fundamental than matter or energy—that the physical world is, at bottom, an information-processing architecture. John Archibald Wheeler proposed this in 1989 with his compressed slogan 'it from bit,' and subsequent developments in black hole thermodynamics, the holographic principle, and quantum information theory have moved the thesis from speculation toward something approaching consensus. Black holes have entropy proportional to the area of their event horizons, not their volume—suggesting that information is encoded on surfaces rather than in volumes. The holographic principle, developed by Gerard 't Hooft and Leonard Susskind, generalizes this observation: the information content of any region of space is proportional to the area of its boundary, not its volume. If information is fundamental, then the emergence of systems that process information—atoms, molecules, cells, brains, computers—is not a curious sidebar in cosmic history but the main plot.
