#information-theory
The Black Hole Information Paradox: Why the Universe Never Forgets
Burn a book and the text is scrambled, not destroyed: physics insists information is never lost. Then Hawking showed that black holes evaporate, and the deepest paradox in modern physics was born. Here is the story, up to the 2019 breakthrough that saved the universe's memory.
Order Without a Plan: A Field Guide to Emergence
How simple local rules, repeated without a conductor, produce wholes their parts can't build alone: Conway's Game of Life, Wolfram's Rule 30, and starling murmurations.
Maxwell's demon and the cost of forgetting
A tiny imaginary creature seemed able to cheat the second law of thermodynamics for a century. The way physics finally caught it reveals something startling: information is physical, and it is erasure, not knowledge, that has to be paid for in heat.
Kolmogorov complexity: the true amount of information in an object
The information in a single object is the length of its shortest description: the smallest program that regenerates it. A definition that makes compression equal to understanding, declares randomness the rule rather than the exception, and turns out to be uncomputable.
Entropy: the measure of our ignorance
Entropy is usually mistaken for disorder. It is better understood as a measure of what we do not know about a system: the bridge that ties together thermodynamics, information, and the physical cost of forgetting.
