Some scientists, such as John Wheeler, who worked with Einstein at Princeton, and Ed Fredkin, are theorizing about the universe in such a way that reality is ultimately reduced to information.
Fredkin's theory of Digital Physics says that,
"the fundamental particles that make up our world - atoms, electrons, quarks - can be further reduced to bits, just like those that carry information in computers".He believes that there is
"an information process and the bits, when they're in certain configurations, behave like the thing we call the electron, or the hydrogen atom, or whatever." (London Review of Books, 18th May 1989)
The implication is not that the universe processes information like a computer, but that the universe is a computer.
© Paul Taylor 2001