Vlatko Vedral is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and CQT (Centre for Quantum Technologies) at the National University of Singapore
In his book Decoding Reality, he argues, as does Seth Lloyd, that the universe is best understood as quantum information. He says,
This book will argue that information (and not matter or energy or love) is the building block on which everything is constructed. Information is far more fundamental than matter or energy because it can be successfully applied to both macroscopic interactions, such as economic and social phenomena, and, as I will argue, information can also be used to explain the origin and behaviour of microscopic interactions such as energy and matter.
As pointed out by Deutsch and Wheeler, however, whatever candidate is proposed for the fundamental building block of the Universe, it still needs to explain its 'own' ultimate origin too. In other words, the question of everything from nothing, creation ex nihilo, is key. So if, as I claim, information is this common thread, the question of creation ex nihilo reduces to explaining how some information arises out of no information. Not only will I show how this is possible, I will also argue that information, in contrast to matter and energy, is the only concept that we currently have that can explain its own origin.
Information philosophy is built on the observation that information is neither matter nor energy. It is not however the underlying "building block," in the sense that matter and energy depend on information in any way.
Interactions between matter and radiation are the source of probabilistic and irreversible behaviors that underlie the uncertainty principle and the arrow of time.
I-phi does show how the information in the universe increases with time despite the second law of thermodynamics. We can thus explain the cosmic creation process and explore the possibility that the origin was creation ex nihilo.
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