Essay Abstract
It is broadly believed that everything in the universe is found to be made from a few basic building blocks called fundamental particles, governed by four fundamental forces. However, physicists such as John Archibald Wheeler suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. According to this it from bit doctrine, all things physical are information-theoretic in origin. This doctrine is based in the old Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics; an interpretation which is internally inconsistent and no applicable to the cosmos as a whole. Modern consistent interpretations of quantum mechanics eliminate the old myths about measurement processes and observers' consciousness and reintroduce the idea of a wholly physical reality, invalidating the it from bit doctrine. Utilizing a new phase space formulation of quantum mechanics developed recently by the author, the concepts of bit and it are reconsidered. We introduce the new states D as quantum bits and the new Hamiltonians H as quantum its. The new concepts of it and bit introduced in this work have a well-defined and rigorous definition, unlike Wheeler's concepts. Moreover, the new concepts apply on situations where the traditional wavefunction theory does not work. The it H is not derivable from the bit D and, as a consequence, the old it from bit doctrine gets substituted by the new it and bit. After showing why the physical entropy used in the science of thermodynamics is not a measure of the ignorance of human observers, the final part of this Essay is devoted to emphasize the importance that the bit acquires in modern science when confronted to the delicious multiplicity of the far-from-equilibrium regimes, where the certainty of Newtonian and Schrödinger motion begin to fade in favor of a complex non-geometrical, 'living', conception of Nature: an it and bit conception.
Author Bio
The author studied physics and chemistry at the University of Vigo. He worked on scientific bodies such as the Ilustre Colegio de Químicos de Galicia and was a CSIC research assistant in biogeochemistry and hydrodynamics of Rias, participating in several conferences, reports, and monographs. The author is working in a unified formulation of physics, chemistry, and biology.