Take some ordinary object, a drinking glass, and start pulling it apart in your mind. Glass, molecules, atoms. Go down into the atom and you find protons and electrons. Go down into the proton and you find quarks. Keep going, and instead of tiny spheres you find fields, waves, probabilities. With every floor you descend, the “matter” grows less solid and more abstract.
At some point a strange question surfaces. Everything that describes a fundamental particle is a list of properties: charge, spin, mass. Numbers, in other words. And if everything, at the very bottom, is only a list of values, then maybe what’s down there isn’t a thing at all, but information about a thing.
What science says, and where it’s careful
Information is a precise, measurable concept. In 1948 Claude Shannon gave the word a mathematical definition, counted in units, indifferent to whatever material happens to carry it. And in physics, too, information turned out to be something real: there’s a deep link between erasing information and heat and disorder, and in the study of black holes information became a lead player. None of that is in doubt.
But here we have to slow down. None of it implies that “the universe is made of information.” It implies that information is a powerful way to describe the universe, which is not the same claim. An excellent description of something is no evidence that the something is built out of the description. Right here, in this thin seam, sits the limit that has to be respected.
The leap, and where it becomes philosophy
The physicist John Wheeler caught it in a phrase that stuck: “It from Bit.” The “it,” every object, every particle, derives from a “bit,” from a yes-or-no answer, from information. It’s a bold proposal: that information is the bottom layer, and that matter is derived from it, not the other way around.
It’s a serious proposal, and a contested one. Not consensus, and not proof. And there’s a trap nearby that’s easy to fall into, the same one we ran into the first time we used the word “information.” “Everything is information” can sound deep while explaining nothing, unless you say information in what sense. A quantity in bits, that has no idea whether a cat or pure noise sits behind it? Or meaning, which no one yet knows how to measure? If you mean the first, you still owe an account of where meaning comes from. If you mean the second, you’ve given the riddle a lovely name rather than an answer.
What tradition offers
The sense that at the foundation of things stands something closer to an utterance, a word or a letter, than to a stone, is old and shared across many traditions. One of its phrasings is the Hebrew one: “and God said, let there be light, and there was light.” The utterance comes before the matter. Creation is described as speech, and “Sefer Yetzirah” goes on to say the world was engraved through letters and numbers. Not a scientific statement, and certainly not a prophecy of information theory. It’s another language entirely, perhaps feeling its way in the same direction: that the root of existence is closer to text than to matter. Whether the resemblance says something, or is only beautiful, is left to you.
To close
Think back to the glass we took apart, and to the moment when, instead of solid matter, all that was left in your hand were fields and numbers. Maybe that’s only a limit of our instruments. Maybe it points at something deeper. At this stage no one really knows.
A question to sit with: if all that remains at the end of taking anything apart is a list of numbers, have we discovered what the world is made of, or only the most precise language we have for talking about it?