Information Physics

For a century we have been told two contradictory things about information. The first is that the universe is secretly made of it—that beneath the atoms there are only bits, that reality is at bottom a kind of code. The second is that "information physics" is fashionable hand-waving, a buzzword dressed up as a discipline. Both verdicts miss what is actually the case, and the truth is stranger and simpler than either. Information is not a substance the world is built from.

Science fiction has imagined some pretty wild ideas about how the universe could work - from hidden extra dimensions in Interstellar to life as a mental projection in The Matrix. But these imaginings seem downright tame compared to the mind-bending science now coming out of physics and astronomy, and in this audiobook, we look at the strange and fascinating discoveries shaping (and reshaping) the field today. 

No less a figure than Bertrand Russell remarked that Aristotle’s Physics was ‘extremely influential and dominated science until the time of Galileo’. This was despite the fact that this work is as much a collection of ‘lectures on nature’ rather than dealing with the science of physics...