What did Erwin Mean? The Physics of Information from the Materials Genomics of Aperiodic Crystals and Water to Molecular Information Catalysts and Life

TL;DR

This paper explores the physics of information in both biological and abiotic materials, demonstrating how information measures reveal structural insights and proposing a new thermodynamic law for information processing in materials.

Contribution

It introduces a unified information-theoretic framework for understanding structure in layered materials and biological molecules, linking information measures to material properties and thermodynamics.

Findings

Information measures quantify disorder in crystals

Information-theoretic analysis of ice I structure

Experimental insights into TBHB structure via information theory

Abstract

Erwin Schrodinger famously and presciently ascribed the vehicle transmitting the hereditary information underlying life to an `aperiodic crystal'. We compare and contrast this, only later discovered to be stored in the linear biomolecule DNA, with the information bearing, layered quasi-one-dimensional materials investigated by the emerging field of chaotic crystallography. Despite differences in functionality, the same information measures capture structure and novelty in both, suggesting an intimate coherence between the information character of biotic and abiotic matter---a broadly applicable physics of information. We review layered solids and consider three examples of how information- and computation-theoretic techniques are being applied to understand their structure. In particular, (i) we review recent efforts to apply new kinds of information measures to quantify disordered crystals; (ii) we discuss the structure of ice I in information-theoretic terms; and (iii) we recount recent experimental results on tris(bicyclo[2.1.1]hexeno)benzene TBHB), showing how an information-theoretic analysis yields additional insight into its structure. We then illustrate a new Second Law of Thermodynamics that describes information processing in active low-dimensional materials, reviewing Maxwell's Demon and a new class of molecular devices that act as information catalysts. Lastly, we conclude by speculating on how these ideas from informational materials science may impact biology.