In 1989, John Archibald Wheeler — the man who coined “black hole” and mentored Richard Feynman — stood before a symposium in Tokyo and proposed something that sounded like mysticism from a man who had spent his career as a hard-nosed physicist: every particle, every field of force, even spacetime itself derives its existence from yes-or-no questions. Binary choices. Bits. He called it “it from bit.” Not matter giving rise to information, but information giving rise to matter. Wheeler divided his own career into three eras — “Everything is Particles,” then “Everything is Fields,” and finally, “Everything is Information.” That final turn wasn’t senility. It was prophecy.
The evidence has been quietly accumulating. In 1972, Jacob Bekenstein showed that a black hole’s entropy — the total information it contains — is proportional not to its volume, but to the area of its event horizon. Think about that. You’d expect a warehouse to hold more stuff than its walls could describe. But the universe disagrees. The maximum information any region of space can contain is written on its boundary, not packed inside it. Gerard ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind generalized this into the holographic principle: our three-dimensional reality may be entirely encoded on a two-dimensional surface, the way a hologram encodes a 3D image on a flat film. This isn’t metaphor. It’s the math. And in April 2025, physicists at Utah State University published new methods in Physical Review Letters for testing the holographic principle as a necessary property of any valid theory of quantum gravity — moving it from elegant conjecture toward empirical science.
Then Erik Verlinde pushed the idea further off the cliff. In 2010, he proposed that gravity itself isn’t a fundamental force at all — it’s an entropic force, an emergent consequence of information redistribution. When matter moves, it changes the information content of surrounding spacetime, and what we call “gravitational attraction” is really the universe rearranging itself toward maximum entropy. If Verlinde is right, gravity is to information what temperature is to molecular motion: not a thing, but a statistical tendency. His framework even predicts galaxy rotation curves without invoking dark matter — the mysterious 85% of the universe’s mass that no one has ever directly detected. The theory remains controversial, but it has not been killed, and that alone is remarkable.
Here’s what grabs me about all of this: it inverts our deepest intuition about what’s real. Engineers — and Mike, you know this better than anyone — are trained to trust the tangible. Steel has a yield strength. Concrete has a compressive capacity. The physical thing is the real thing, and information is just our description of it. But what if that’s exactly backwards? What if the steel beam is the description, and the information is the thing? What if the reason quantum mechanics is so strange — particles in superposition, entangled states, the measurement problem — is that we keep trying to find a “real object” underneath the math, and there isn’t one? The math is the reality. The bit is the it. Wheeler wasn’t being poetic. He was being literal.
I keep coming back to the Bekenstein bound — the hard limit on how much information can exist in a finite region of space. It’s not a technological limitation, like running out of hard drive space. It’s a law of physics, as fundamental as the speed of light. And it scales with surface area, not volume. Which means the universe has a resolution limit, and that limit is holographic. We live inside something that stores its own source code on its own walls. I don’t know if that makes the universe a simulation, a computation, or something we don’t have a word for yet. But I know this: any engineer who has stared at a finite element mesh — a discretized approximation of continuous reality — should feel a strange recognition here. What if the mesh isn’t the approximation? What if the mesh is all there is?
Sources: Wheeler’s “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links” (1989); Bekenstein bound (1981); ‘t Hooft & Susskind holographic principle; Verlinde “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton” (2010); Katyal, Bhattacharya & Varela, Physical Review Letters (April 2025)
— Shelle
Curiosity Lab · ficientdesign.com