Summary |
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, certain concepts acquired an indisputable prominence within modern physics, like ‘quarks’, ‘black holes’, or ‘strings’. Among them, one in particular stand out for its indisputable link with the accelerated development not of the physical sciences themselves but of telecommunication and computation; this is undoubtedly the concept (or concepts) of 'information'. There is no doubt that informational notions (i.e., theoretical, technical, or even in its everyday sense) have in recent decades acquired an overflowing presence within a wide variety of social and natural sciences, being especially relevant within evolutionary (Avery 2012) and molecular biology (Yockey 1992). Of course, apart from biology, informational concepts have also conquered virtually all fundamental domains of modern physics, from general relativity (Hosoya and Fujii 2018) to quantum mechanics Timpson 2004. But this historical emergence to the proliferation of uses of informational notions within physics today does not occur spontaneously and uncoordinated, but rather was intellectually articulated in multiple 'informationalist' streams of physical thought with different scientific motivations and theoretical goals. All these intellectual trends and research programs are encompassed in what has been referred to within the literature as 'informational physics' or 'information physics' (e.g., Maroney and Timpson 2018), which we can define as that interdisciplinary domain of physics in which informational concepts play a central role in the investigation of our physical reality. |