It from Bit
From the public record
Proposed by: John Archibald Wheeler, applied in community discussions
If physics is informational at root, a perceptual state that exposes structure could in principle expose informational structure.
John Archibald Wheeler's it from bit proposal holds that every physical thing derives its existence from yes-no questions, information before matter. Community discussions borrow the phrase as the physics-respectable backbone for code readings. The borrowed version goes far beyond what Wheeler claimed, and the distance between the two is itself worth seeing clearly.
Source: Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links (1989) (academic)
Tags: information, physics