What is information? Not a message, not bytes on a disk, but something deeper — the very orderedness of matter. The difference between a shuffled deck and a sorted one isn’t in the material, but in the order. That order is information.
Shannon’s formula echoes Boltzmann’s for a reason: where the physicist sees entropy, the communication theorist sees a lack of information. It’s one and the same quantity, taken from different sides.
Three supports
For information to grow, three conditions are needed:
- disequilibrium — a source that keeps the system in motion;
- a carrier — matter able to hold a structure (a crystal, DNA, a page, silicon);
- computation — matter’s ability to turn one organization into another.
When all three come together, order begins to accumulate. And then the history of the universe becomes the history of how information finds ever more reliable ways to preserve itself.