Abstract

Of John Wheeler’s ‘Really Big Questions’, the one on which the most progress has been made is It From Bit? – does information play a significant role at the foundations of physics? It is perhaps less ambitious than some of the other Questions, such as How Come Existence?, because it does not necessarily require a metaphysical answer. And unlike, say, Why The Quantum?, it does not require the discovery of new laws of nature: there was room for hope that it might be answered through a better understanding of the laws as we currently know them, particularly those of quantum physics. And this is what has happened: the better understanding is the quantum theory of information and computation.