At the very tip of the Statue of Liberty, defining the highest point on Lady Liberty’s torch, sits a single atom of gold.
Why is it there?
Does the answer lie solely in the realm of fundamental physical laws, or must we turn to principles of information to truly understand? Or, the real question: what fundamentally governs our universe — the immutable laws of physics, or the ever-evolving patterns of information?
While physical laws exclusively govern the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions, the universe's complexity gives rise to emergent patterns where information resides. To understand these patterns—especially those imbued with meaning and purpose by human agency, such as the gold on the Statue of Liberty—requires acknowledging descriptive informational principles. These principles articulate how information, though always physically encoded in matter, shapes our understanding and provides explanations for higher-order realities.
Thus, physical laws and informational descriptions are not in inherent tension but are complementary and necessary. One describes matter and its rules, the other the emergent patterns and their significance.
What is information?
Every question expresses uncertainty. To resolve uncertainty is to acquire information. Information, in this sense, is quantifiable. The amount of information needed to answer a question can be measured by counting all the possible answers. Every time we eliminate half of the potential answers, we have acquired one "bit" of information.
Big questions are often broken into smaller, easier questions, allowing us to narrow down the answer by asking successive yes-or-no questions, receiving one bit at a time. Eventually, we accumulate enough bits to answer the larger question—we possess information.
But where does this information reside? Where is it stored, and what is its nature?
Information is physical
On one hand, information can seem abstract. The fact that 1 \+ 1 \= 2 simply is, regardless of whether it is etched in stone, printed in ink, or held in the synapses of a brain.
Yet, as the late pioneering information theorist Rolf Landauer famously stated, "Information is physical." This isn't merely a metaphorical claim. To store, process, or transmit information requires doing something in the real world, with physical stuff—the traditional purview of physics. Indeed, as we understand it, nothing but matter (and its associated energy and fields) can encode information.
We cannot possess information except by extracting it from the real world—we get "bit from it."
This perspective naturally leads us toward physicalism and, often, down the path of reductionism. If information is instantiated in physical systems, then the laws governing those systems must be primary. We are told that chemistry is just applied physics. Since molecules are made of atoms, the rules obeyed by atoms must explain the existence and behavior of molecules.
But atoms themselves are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons—so, a strict reductionist might argue, we don't ultimately need the concept of atoms. We could, in principle, describe everything in terms of fundamental particles and forces.
Following this line of thought, the gold on Lady Liberty's torch is there because the fundamental forces and the laws of physics governing its constituent particles allow, and in some sense necessitate, its presence through a long chain of cause and effect. All the details of those atoms, their properties, and their interactions are the subjects of countless Ph.D. theses. We can, with enough effort, describe anything measurable about that gold using the language of physics.
However, a purely reductionist account faces a profound challenge. While the physical laws underpin every detail, the sheer complexity of the emergent patterns means that physics alone, starting from first principles, struggles to provide a meaningful explanation for why the gold is there in that specific, human-influenced context.
To derive such a state from fundamental physics alone would necessitate simulating the entirety of the relevant system through its history—an act of duplication, not concise explanation. Matter without higher-order emergence, where information truly lies, is just that: matter. Information, residing in these patterns, becomes crucial.
Physics is informational
If reductionism offers an incomplete picture, what is the alternative? Instead of Landauer’s "information is physical" (bit from it), the physicist John Archibald Wheeler proposed a counter-slogan, "it from bit." Wheeler suggested that physics itself—the "it" of reality—might be derivable from more fundamental principles of information (the "bit"). Inspired by the strange implications of quantum mechanics, where the act of observation seems inextricably linked to the outcome, Wheeler posited the "participatory anthropic principle." In this view, reality is not a pre-existing stage on which we are merely actors. Rather, it is co-created as we ask it questions, one bit at a time. We get "it from bit."
This perspective elevates the role of information from a mere property of physical systems to something potentially more fundamental. It acknowledges that information is necessary to give the world meaning, to even ask a question, or to identify that matter exists in particular configurations. We don’t just passively discover a pre-formed world—our interaction with it, our process of gathering information, shapes our understanding and, in a quantum sense, the very reality we describe.
Matter, patterns, and emergence
The provocative slogans "bit from it" and "it from bit" seem to set up an intractable dichotomy. Must one be entirely right and the other wrong? Perhaps not.
The tension is, in many ways, only apparent. Both views are necessary and consistent if we understand their respective domains. There is only matter and the physical laws it obeys. And as we've established, nothing but matter can encode information. However, that same matter interacting under physical laws gives rise to astonishing levels of complexity—to emergent patterns.
Information describes these patterns. Physical laws describe matter and its fundamental rules. Information describes the specific arrangements, structures, and behaviors that emerge from these rules.
The complexity of these patterns, especially those involving living systems and conscious agents, is so immense that they gain a level of reality and causal efficacy of their own, not practically reducible to the sum of their parts. This is the realm of emergence.
Let us return to the gold on the Statue of Liberty's torch.
We will never fully answer the question "why is it there?" by starting only from the fundamental forces its atoms experience. The initial reductionist claim that "the laws of physics require it to be placed exactly where it is" tells us nothing of the meaning or purpose of its placement.
To understand that, we need the stories—the layers of human intention, history, culture, and even error. What most people know is that the Statue of Liberty (officially Liberty Enlightening the World) was a gift to America from France. Its genesis lay more in 19th-century French political idealism and American post-Civil War sentiment than in quantum electrodynamics. But even this doesn't explain the current torch.
The original copper torch, now in a museum, had a troubled history of ill-conceived modifications, including holes cut for internal lights that failed to make it shine effectively. Its eventual replacement in 1986 with the current gilded torch involves concepts like ineptitude, restoration, and centennial celebrations—notions entirely alien to fundamental particles.
Why gold in 1986? Again, the answers lie in theories of human physiology (our attraction to shiny things), sociology, politics, and economics. Centennials, irrelevant from a cosmic perspective, hold meaning for humans, justifying significant expenditure. Gold possesses physical properties like its brilliant sheen and resistance to corrosion, but its value and the desire to use it are cultural constructs. These are all informational patterns, encoded in human brains, societal structures, historical records, and financial systems — all ultimately physical, but whose explanatory power resides in their informational content.
We can list innumerable historical facts and physical properties, but each answer to "why?" will foliate into more questions. An attempt to provide a complete, reductionist physical explanation would, as noted, require replicating the universe in all its detail leading up to that moment—an answer no one has asked for and that offers little true understanding of the specific query.
The truth about that gold atom is not a single, monolithic truth derived from one set of laws. There are layers of explanation. Physical laws govern the existence and interaction of the atoms themselves. But the reasons for their specific arrangement into a gilded torch atop a colossal statue in New York Harbor are found in stories—the rich, complex, emergent informational patterns generated by human thought, culture, and history.
Whether a story is "good" or "true" in this context depends on the level of explanation sought. The apparent dichotomy between physical laws and informational principles dissolves when we see them as describing different, yet equally real and necessary, aspects of our universe. Physical laws provide the fundamental substrate, the "it." But it is through the lens of information, through the patterns and "bits" we discern and create, that this "it" acquires the layers of meaning, purpose, and significance that constitute the world we experience and strive to understand. The governance of our complex world is a duet, played by the immutable rules of matter and the emergent symphony of information.