Information as a Building Block
open in notion ↗Information as substrate: Shannon to emergence to it-from-qubit.
The mathematical foundation. Shannon's 1948 paper turned information from a vague word into a measurable quantity with units and theorems; this unit gets you fluent in that language.
Boltzmann, Maxwell's demon, Landauer: erasing information costs energy — the hinge that makes information physical, not just mathematical.
Kolmogorov, Chaitin, randomness: the information content of a string is the length of the shortest program that produces it, connecting information theory to computation (Turing) and Gödel-style undecidability.
Reconstruction programs, qubits, entanglement: quantum information reframes QM as a theory of a different kind of information, with entanglement as a resource and its own theorems. Reconstructions of QM try to derive quantum mechanics from a few information-theoretic axioms.
The thing that makes information interesting: emergence and complexity, from Anderson's More Is Different through chaos theory and the Santa Fe Institute to the current frontier (causal emergence, scaling laws, networks). Needs a critical posture — weak emergence, strong emergence, and emergence-as-mysticism must be kept distinct.
Biology, origin of life, assembly theory: life resists entropy by feeding on negative entropy from the environment. Covers current attempts — assembly theory, the free energy principle, dissipative adaptation — to give life an information-theoretic foundation.
Optional extension, only if Units 4 and 5 leave you hungry — this is where current theoretical physics thinks reality might actually live: Bekenstein's black hole entropy, the information paradox, the holographic principle, AdS/CFT, and spacetime from entanglement.