Interview in WIRED Mar-11, with the author of the book The Information, James Gleick. Information flows everywhere, through wires and genes, through brain cells and quark. But the conclusion in short is, the universe we know is only information.
Information is a thing, not only an about-concept and generalization (digital physics, btw, is a collection of theoretical perspectives based on the premise that the universe is, at heart, describable by information, and is therefore computational).
In his book A New Kind Of Science, Stephen Wolfram expects that spacetime is a huge network - with emergent features of the large-scale behavior of some simple rules.
Recently, I found The Black Hole Of Finance. In the lecture it is suggested that financial systems possess a kind of negative "energy" in the form of debt. And because gravitational energy is negative, self-gravitating systems are susceptible to to runaway instabilities ... models of how energy/money distributes itself are similar ...
Information is the thing, informing our world in writing, painting, music, money, prices, equity, debt, risk factors, ... Some of them with emergent features of the large scale behavior of simple codes, that have a quantity themselves, independent of their semantic value.
The basis for the universe of quant finance is numbers. Whilst mathematical symbols are alluring, numbers seem to be boring. And not giving much insight, if you look into them separately. Remember a VaR expressing risk as a single number is dangerous.
But it does not help, numerical schemes do represent a vast variety of models and produce fields of numerical information for better decisions in a robust way.
They are the indispensable basis our UnRiskverse.
