By Sally Morem
Two armies have taken their stands in the last two centuries on question such as these. They face each other across a wide philosophical gulf. On one side, the scientists with exhaustive observations, measurements and theorizing. On the other side, the theologians with thoughts and revelations of the Infinite and its relationship with the Finite.
Many scientists describe a universe of chance. Human beings, life, the Earth, the stars, and the galaxies came into being accidentally, against all odds. They maintain their precarious existence in the face of certain destruction. Entropy--the force of disintegration--dooms all of creation to the irrevocable loss of usable energy until there is nothing.
Some theologians assert that the destiny of all things was written into the fabric of the universe in one brief, glorious burst of creativity. This is the scripted universe. God is the Great Designer, ordering all things, including the lives of human beings, in the day of creation. We are to recite our lines and play our parts as dutiful actors.
Meanwhile, separately and ignorant of each other's work, biologists, physicists, meteorologists, mathematicians and computer scientists have begun to detect the faint outlines of a third way of looking at the universe. A self-creating universe in which chance plays but a part but does not rule. A free universe which is not constrained by the blueprints of a Cosmic Plan. A universe in which complexity is built up through time instead of being torn down.
Here, elementary particles, atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies, and all manner of life, including us, partake in the development of processes more vast and grand than scientists or theologians had ever imagined. Here, universal structures move from the simple to the complex, from lower to higher levels of capability. Here, all energy and matter reveal the emergent properties of orderly chaos inherent in The Grassroots Creation.
In 1948, Bell Labs published two papers written by Claude Shannon, consisting of a set of theorems on the problem of sending messages. Jeremy Campbell explains the importance of Shannon's theorems in his book, "Grammatical Man": "By treating information in clearly defined but wholly abstract terms, Shannon was able to generalize it, establishing laws that hold good not for a few types of information, but for all kinds, everywhere. While his papers may appear quite abstruse and technical at first reading, they offer new ways of looking at world processes which seem incomprehensible when views through the lens of classical ideas. Their full meaning still has not been exhausted. In spite of the fact that the theorems of information theory were intended chiefly for radio and telephone engineers, they can be used to investigate ANY system in which a 'message' is sent from one place to another."
Information theory was born.
It started as any other scientific theory, making predictions about events using laws and equations. Then it grew into a universal principle. Information specifies shape and function. It orders matter and energy into meaningful patterns. It is abstraction. It is pattern.
Why is the world full of the most improbable kinds of order when chaos is a far more probable state for the world to be in? Information theory translates this overwhelming question into a more precise and a more useful one: Why are there messages instead of mere noise?
A Harvard astronomer, David Layzer, proposed that the universe began in utmost simplicity. No structure, no pattern, no information. In other words, the Big Bang was very "noisy!" As the universe began to expand, structure appeared. Elementary particles emerged and joined together to form atoms as the universe cooled enough for structure to become stable. The information content of the universe grew and continues to grow today.
This explains the existence of messages. Information can be generated and retained under these circumstances. This also means that the universe always contains more information now than it did a moment ago. As I write these words and you read them, we create information.
Information by its very definition is unpredictable. A message, in order to be a message, must deliver novelty. Completely predictable information is redundant: It is a recording of an old message. Thus, as the universe generates new information, its future state must be considered unknowable. It is open to the totally unexpected.
Even so, redundancy does help to get a message delivered. If noise destroys part of a message, the whole message can still be reconstructed if it is coded properly. Nature makes uncountably large numbers of copies of its messages in the form of cells, leaves, and children.
Redundancy can be nested. Brief messages may be embedded in a longer message to allow for self-correction. Biologists believe that the genes in DNA strings incorporate such a system as a control mechanism for RNA protein building machines. "Letters" in the genetic code may form overlapping "words" allowing many messages to be sent in what would appear to be a short code, yet maintaining redundancy so that the messages are not garbled.
The universe is an information-generating engine ignited by the Big Bang and powered by its own expansion. In this case, the medium truly IS the message.