The Information Edge

What makes things fall apart? During the 2008 global financial crisis, MIT quantum physicist Seth Lloyd (Programming the Universe, Jonathan Cape, 2006) was struck by a strange pattern. Viewed from a mathematical perspective, the failure of the world economy looked a lot like the gravitational collapse of a star into a black hole. It also looked like the formation of a cancerous tumour in an otherwise healthy body, and like the catastrophic destruction of ecosystems. On the other hand, it also looked like a certain theory of how life got started in the first place. Here was the logic of collapse, of creation and destruction, reduced to its mathematical signature. From this lofty theoretical viewpoint, we can at last do what for millennia astrologers have claimed: see human fates written in the stars.