What does “information” exactly mean?

Back in the university, a lecturer once asked us whether any of us know what does “information” in Information Technology exactly means. With every department desperately trying to catch up with latest trends, cloaking themselves with this much hyped word, he wanted to find the real meaning behind it.

At that time, I came up with a possible answer coming from the morphology of the word: in-formation, meaning something that has never taken any form, something beyond space and time, thus beyond any comprehension. Others thought “in” means “in the process of” (constant) formation, that is, information being an ever changing entity. Well, none of the explanations were convincing enough, so we concluded that this mystery is yet to be solved.

It kept me bugging ever since. Not stating that I’ve finally found the answer (that remains the privilege of the enlightened to know), I still found an interesting explanation in the book Buddha and the particle accelerator by István Héjjas, where he associates ancient knowledge (of religious origins) and modern physics. Information, in this explanation is associated with sattva, an ethereal, very fine quality of the three qualities that make up the physical world. The other two qualities are rajas, a very fiery quality, the equivalent of energy in modern physics, and tamas, a very worldly, still and dense quality, the equivalent of matter. The three always appear together, matter being the mass, energy providing the dynamism, and information determining the spatial and temporal distribution of all of it. None of these qualities can appear in their pure form. I like this explanation because it puts information in a place where – though it is beyond touch, still – its presence is observable within our time-space continuum.

Thinking it further from the IT perspective, the analogies will be, matter obviously being the hardware that provides the base for the electromagnetic fields, energy being the electromagnetic forces responsible for altering the electromagnetic fields, while information provides the distribution patterns.

So what does information really mean, then?

It is the essence that brings in the order and meaning to the otherwise chaotically behaving mass. This explains all the chaos you suddenly find yourself in when an unwanted “information loss” happens.

Information Technology, therefore, is (or at least supposed to be) the collection of knowledge and tools with which we can understand, harness and tame all that chaos around us.