In building out this framework the books touches upon the origin of information, the idea of entropy, the roots of this thinking in thermodynamics, the replication of DNA, development of social networks, quantum behaviour at the micro and macro level, and the very role of indeterminism in the universe.

Vedral believes information is the fundamental building block of reality as it occurs at the macro level (economics, human behaviour etc.)

'Annihilation of everything' is a more fitting term than creation ex nihilo Vedral states, as compression of possibilities is the process of how new information is created.

Vedral uses an Italo Calvino philosophical story about a tarot-like card game as the kernel for his metaphor of conscious life arriving in medias res to a pre-existing contextual reality.

Claude Shannon's information theory arose from research at Bell labs, building upon George Boole's digital logic.

Genetic code as an efficient digital information store, containing built in codon redundancy for error correction in transcription.

For managed risk spread bets widely and in high-risk high-reward investments (assuming a known probability), this is the Log optimal portfolio approach.

Six degrees of separation means well connected people tend to be more successful as their social networks expose them to more chances to make choices they want.

Schelling precommitment as strategy in social and self-control, for example burning your bridges by buying gym membership to help motivated self win over lazy self.

Mutual information resulting in phase transitions in social and political demography as well as physical systems, like water freezing into ice at a particular critical temperature or magnetic fields spontaneously aligning in certain atoms when cooling from a molten state.

Vedral however sees this content as ultimately limitless as possibly maximum entropy is never reached as compression of complexity is an open ended process and random events will continue to occur.

We are all transient patterns of information, passing on the recipe for our basic forms to future generations using a four-letter digital code called DNA.