I was digging down through this thread, alternately struggling and grooving on the sweeping concepts, when you brought up parameters (and quickly dropped them again). I was struck a glancing blow by a Thought.

What role does information play in the universe? It must be integral to the universe, since our ability to describe a thing means that thing has attributes of information. If we someday stop discovering ever-smaller particles, and discover the One True and Indivisible Particle, there would remain more of something smaller: The parameters that describe that particle. At least six of them: length, width, height, and location in three dimensions (any of which could be zero, but the important thing is that the value is known). Any fewer than that, and this supposedly smallest point is, paradoxically, infinite in one or more unsupplied dimensions. Beyond matter, then, is information.

Information not only has an analogous descriptive relationship with energy, it has properties analogous to energy. Some are pretty obvious, such as its tendency to flow, and the observation that "knowledge is power". But wait, there's more. Claude Shannon's work on "Information Theory" (pub. 1948) showed, among many things, that the minimum unit of information is the bit...obvious once it's pointed out, since a bit can represent one of two states, conventionally on or off, or 1 or 0. Any fewer states, and it would contain no information at all.

You can only get useful work from energy when there's a differential to exploit; so too with information, where it's only useful when there's a difference of state to convey information. Knowledge is power is a meaniingful analogy.

Building on this, Information Theory provides tools for evaluating and measuring information. The distribution of difference measures randomness and "information entropy", which is a tool for evaluating the strength of cypher systems; pointed the other way, analysis of a signal's degree of entropy yields patterned artifacts that provide traction for a codebreaker. Having a way to represent information as numbers makes it possible to use mathematics to transform information, to achieve, among other things, compression and error-detection/correction codes.

I guess the real innovation in Information Theory is that information is more than something we passively receive through our senses (or pass along after it pops into hour heads from thin air), it's also something with properties we can manipulate. Not at the gross level of altering the content or at a level that requires any understanding of the content; but on the information as an abstract concept. In clearer terms, for example a compression algorithm doesn't need to know what the text it's compressing means, it only needs to know how to manipulate information in the abstract to compress the text. That's the great leap forward: The concept of information separate from specific instances of information.

At this point, I'm looking for a word that unifies the contents of the universe the way "spacetime" unifies dimension. How about, for want of a better term, "Stuff": spacetime + matter + energy.

Every bit of Stuff has information associated with it. The question naturally arises, is that information just a consequence of Stuffness? Or does Stuffness arise from information?

Is the universe read-only, or can we write to it as well?

If writeable, we can answer a theological question: Omniscience begat omnipotence.

Teleportation by simply resetting the coordinates of every particle in an object. Transmutation of elements at the twist of a dial. Nuclear explosions without all that messy implosion stuff--just lower a threshold. Always a full coffeeput, simply because "I said so!". Superposition--gives a whole new meaning to "mi casa es tu casa". Weight loss through long division. (Praise be to the Civility Slate for OffTopic!)

We've always lived in a universe of Stuff, but we just recently discovered (or dreamt up) the parallel dimension of Information. It's barely been explored, so who knows what's there to discover? It may be the key to mastery of the universe. Or we might just drill down and discover something deeper.

We have pretty much the same senses as all other animals, but we consider our brains to be what makes us unique. Maybe what we call sentience is the development of an additional sense capable of perceiving the information content of the universe. We developed hands to manipulate the universe our conventional senses showed us; maybe we'll develop another kind of hand to manipulate what this information sense reveals. I took what seemed like a sidetrip through Information Theory to look at the rudimentary tools already developed for grasping and manipulating information. Perhaps Information Theory is the first harbinger of the emergence of something like a mental hand.

Maybe we could learn to write to the universe.