Is Information a Fundamental Force of Physics?

By Quanta Magazine

Community Score: 50% | 216.0K views | 8mo

0 community ratings: null thumbs up, null thumbs down

Researchers Robert Hazen and Michael Wong have put forward a bold new law of nature — one that could explain how everything in the universe evolves, from atoms, minerals and stars to living cells, ecosystems and even human civilization. At the heart of their theory is the idea that information is as fundamental to the cosmos as mass, energy or charge. Their law revolves around a concept called functional information — a measure of the ratcheting-up of complexity and function in evolving systems over time. Read the Quanta Magazine article "Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex" - https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-everything-in-the-universe-turns-more-complex-20250402/ PAPERS: - "On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems" (2023); M. Wong, C. Cleland, D. Arend Jr, S. Bartlett, H. J. Cleaves II, H. Demarest, A. Prabhu, J. I. Lunine, R. Hazen - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120 - "Functional information: Molecular messages" (2003); J. Szostak -

Tags: science, quanta, quanta magazine, explainer, science explainer, science video, educational video, evolution, physics, complexity, entropy, minerals, complex systems, laws of physics, biology