Special Issue "Information and Energy/Matter"

Guest Editor
Dr. Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic
School of Innovation, Design and Engineering, Computer Science Laboratory, Mälardalen University, Sweden
Website: http://www.idt.mdh.se/~gdc
E-Mail:
Interests: philosophy of information and computing

Dear Colleagues,

We stand on the edge of one more major leap in our understanding of the universe. One of many indications for the need of radical re-conceptualization is the fact that in our current understanding most of the universe seems to consist of something we know next to nothing about - dark energy and dark matter. All our knowledge about physics however is based on ordinary energy/matter which makes up less than 5% of what we know as the universe.

There are several strategies for attacking this problem of understanding of physical reality, and already today we can see the beginnings of the development of a new conception of the world, where physics is placed in a broader context of human knowledge. It goes via basic ideas of information and computation. This development is a consequence of the advances in information processing technologies which affect knowledge production and our grasp of the fundamental ideas of reality, human mind and cognition, knowledge, sciences, humanities, engineering and arts.

Many have already declared that reality basically is an informational phenomenon. To name but a few: Wheeler with IT FROM BIT; Floridi with Informational Structural Realism; Lloyd, Seife, Vedral with Decoding Reality; Frieden with Physics from Fisher Information and more. How does this information relate to energy/matter?

The essential for new approaches is closure - coming back to human which is the center of all knowledge production about the world. This self-reflective process has traditionally been avoided because of the practical problems in addressing it computationally. Nowadays we have tools at our disposal which help us understand self-reflective dynamical structures, so this does not present a problem for modeling anymore.

The idea is to explore how the framework for knowledge production relates to what can be known (and all of our knowledge is structured information so laws of physics are information about the informational structure of the world – a meta-information). It connects information with matter-energy as we find it in the world and in the observer of the world.

This special issue will explore all the different facets of the relationship between the world (physical world as we know it in form of energy/matter) and information.

Dr. Gordana Dodig Crnkovic
Guest Editor

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Information is an international peer-reviewed Open Access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

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• information
• energy/matter
• IT FROM BIT
• informational structural realism
• decoding reality
• physics from information