Matter, Energy & Information
Landauer's world: the physical substrate of data
Overview
Matter, energy, and information together constitute Landauer's world: the domain in which information is always physically embodied in material substrates and always requires energy to process, store, and erase. DNA stores genetic information in molecular matter using metabolic energy. Computers store digital information in silicon using electrical energy. Every information technology is a specific material-energetic implementation of an informational function — and Landauer's principle guarantees that this implementation always has a physical cost.
Central Tension
The tension is between the apparent substrate-independence of information and its irreducible material-energetic cost. The same information can be encoded in DNA, ink, silicon, or light — suggesting that information transcends any particular material-energetic implementation. Yet Landauer's principle and thermodynamics insist that information can never float free of matter and energy: every bit requires a physical substrate and every computation requires energy. Whether information is a universal pattern that matter-energy merely instantiates, or an intrinsic property of matter-energy itself, is the defining question of this triad.
Key Philosophical Questions
- Does Landauer's principle prove that information is irreducibly physical, or merely that our current physics requires material-energetic substrates for information?
- Is there a fundamental limit to how efficiently matter and energy can encode and process information?
- Could information exist without any material-energetic embodiment — or is physical instantiation a necessary condition for information to be real?
- Is the universe itself a material-energetic computer processing information, or is this a metaphor rather than a literal description?
Schools of Thought
Information is always materially encoded and energetically processed; Landauer's principle is a fundamental physical law, not a contingent engineering constraint.
Matter and energy are the hardware, information is the software; the universe is a computation running on a material-energetic substrate at a deeper level of reality.
Information is primary; matter and energy are the physical medium through which information expresses itself. The material-energetic cost is real but secondary.
Matter, energy, and information are all aspects of process; every physical event simultaneously transforms matter, transfers energy, and carries information.
God's Word (information) structures matter and energy according to divine purpose. The material-energetic cost of information reflects creaturely finitude; God's own informational activity (creation, providence, revelation) is not limited by thermodynamic constraints.
Synthesis
Matter, energy, and information together describe Landauer's world: a universe in which every bit has a physical home and every computation has an energetic cost. This triad is the foundation of all information technology and all physical science, and its deepest insight is that information is not abstract but physical — as real as the matter that encodes it and the energy that processes it.
Related Dimension Pairs