This idea is sometimes called the it-from-bit hypothesis, a label first used by the physicist John Wheeler in 1989. Wheeler may have intended something different by the phrase, as I’ll discuss later in the chapter, but the it-from-bit idea is so powerful that it has transcended his original conception. The powerful idea is that everything in the physical world around us—tables and chairs, stars and planets, dogs and cats, electrons and quarks—is made of patterns of bits.
