Decoding Reality

A mind-bending exploration of the deepest questions about the Universe For a physicist, the world and its workings are all the ebb and flow of information. Living beings, for example, are transient patterns of information, passing on the recipe for our basic forms to future generations using a four-letter digital code called DNA. Vlatko Vedral explores the mind-stretching implications of interpreting the Universe in terms of information. His energetic investigation takes us to some of the deepest questions about the Universe and also some of the most everyday, including stock-market predictions, planning a diet, and successful dating. He gives us brilliant explanations of the nature of information, the idea of entropy, and the roots of this thinking in thermodynamics. He describes the bizarre effects of quantum behaviour-effects such as 'entanglement'-what Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance'. He explores cutting-edge work on harnessing quantum effects in hyperfast quantum computers, and how recent evidence suggests that the weirdness of the quantum world, once thought limited to the tiniest scales, may reach into the macro world and make teleportation a reality. And then there is the ultimate question: where did all of the information in the Universe come from? The answers he considers are exhilarating, and challenge our concept of the nature of particles, of time, of determinism, and of reality itself.