Take some object, say a glass, and start taking 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. Go further, and instead of tiny spheres you find fields, waves, probabilities. At every floor you descend, the “matter” becomes less solid and more abstract.
At a certain point a strange question arises. Everything that describes a fundamental particle is a list of properties: charge, spin, mass. Numbers. And if everything, at the bottom, is only a list of values, maybe what’s down there isn’t a thing at all, but information about a thing.
What science says, and where it’s careful
Start with the solid part. Information is a precise, measurable concept. In 1948 Claude Shannon gave the word a mathematical definition, measured in units, independent of the material carrying 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. These are established things.
But here we have to stop. None of that implies that “the universe is made of information.” It implies that information is a powerful way to describe the universe. That isn’t the same thing. An excellent description of something is not evidence that the something is built out of the description. Right here, in this thin difference, lies the limit that has to be respected.
The leap, and where it becomes philosophy
The physicist John Wheeler put 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. His proposal is bold: that information is the bottom layer, and matter is derived from it, not the other way around.
It’s a serious proposal, and contested. Not consensus, and not proof. And there’s a trap here that’s easy to fall into, the same trap we met when we talked about the word “information.” “Everything is information” can sound deep and explain nothing, unless you say information in the sense of what. A quantity in bits, that doesn’t know whether behind it is a cat or noise? Or meaning, that no one yet knows how to measure? If the first is meant, you still have to explain where meaning comes from. If the second, we’ve given a beautiful name to the riddle, not solved it.
What tradition offers
The intuition that at the foundation of things stands something closer to an utterance, a word or a letter than to a stone, is ancient and shared by many traditions. One of its phrasings is the Jewish one: “And God said, let there be light, and there was light.” The utterance precedes the matter. Creation is described as speech, and “Sefer Yetzirah” goes on to hold that the world was engraved through letters and numbers. Not a scientific statement, and obviously not a prophecy of information theory. It’s an entirely different language that maybe feels out the same direction: that the root of existence is closer to text than to matter. We point at the resemblance and leave it to you to decide whether it says something, or is only beautiful.
To close
Go back to the glass we took apart, and to the moment when, instead of solid matter, all that remained in your hand were fields and numbers. Maybe that’s only a limit of our tools, and maybe it hints at something deeper. At this stage, no one really knows.
So, to close, a question: if at the end of taking anything apart only a list of numbers remains, have we discovered what the world is made of, or only the most precise language we have for talking about it?