Wojciech Zurek is onto something wonderful.
My dad is a physicist and runs and Internet startup. Since I am over 40 myself, this is fairly unusual. It also means that when we don’t talk about physics, we talk about computers. For the last couple of years this has amounted to pretty much the same thing, since I have become immersed in the voguish idea that physics and information theory are essentially the same thing.
My hobbyist hunch is that information is relative (being measured in bit pairs) and that it doesn’t flow so much as sync. I believe that the interpretation problems we have explaining the experimental results at the extremes of physics magnify the effects of us trying to explain the inevitable information syncing within system that we are part of by looking near the scale of the entire system or its individual bits, where the definition of the system itself or the bits themselves as something that exists outside of purely our relationship to it/them gets in the way
My second hunch is that the pattern of this inevitable trend towards information syncing (when you communicate you eliminate difference) has another name – Darwinism, and the meta-rule of life – Darwinism, seems much more fundamental than its qualitative use to describe things that poop.
Darwinism is simply the law of efficient elimination of difference, that drives the laws of physics. A true meta-physics that has nothing to do with spirituality and can be expressed quantitatively. I would put my money on the idea that the eventual constant that cancels out the multitude of physical constants will be a ‘D’ in an equation – or perhaps more likely, an algorithm of – Darwinism.
There are a few scientists that are currently most exciting in this area of info-physics/biology/chemistry, such as Lee Smolin and Stuart Kauffman, but Wojciech Zurek seems particularly close to a breakthrough in understanding.
In July he produced a paper that tickles my hunches, (although I have a further hunch that even his ‘relativistic’ view of information is not relativistic enough – that the ‘environment’ that he allows us to use as an indirect witness of some kind of branching quantum lightning bolt, in universal space – simply does not exist. The environment is information’s ether).
That paper, linked to here, is much more technical than my paltry understanding of physics – but I found it somewhat life-changing, so don’t be put off. It is written in the language of physics which is different from everyday English, and it also uses the excessive 3rd person language of technical papers, but it is much easier than it looks to get something out of as a non scientist, if you read it carefully, since, like all great ideas it is itself, elegantly simple.