And Now! I am pleased to announce the winners of our 2013 Essay Contest, "It From Bit, or Bit From It?"
The contest theme this year took its inspiration from an idea of John Wheeler, asking whether It came from Bit? Some of our entries of course tried to answer that question directly, but I was happy to see that many entries took on the stickier job of trying to understand just what Wheeler meant with that question. Did he mean, does the actual universe emerge as an evolving answer to a series of yes/no questions? Or did he just mean, do all physical laws reduce to binary computations? Or does the question not make any sense at all?
I must also credit another inspiration for this year's contest: an entry from Julian Barbour into our 2011 contest Digital or Analog. Julian's essay, "Bit From It", anticipated our theme by challenging Wheeler's concept, with the assertion that "things, not information, are primary".
Now, let's get to the winners:
First prize of $10,000 goes to ...
Matt Leifer, for his essay ""It from bit" and the quantum probability rule".
Matt is an independent researcher with a specialty in quantum foundations. His essay presents options for answering the essay question either way, and then argues that the options do not conflict with each other. Matt writes (excellently) about these and related issues on his blog.
Our Second Prize winners, who both receive $5,000, come from contest regulars...
Carlo Rovelli, for "Relative information at the foundation of physics",
and the team of Angelo Bassi, Saikat Ghosh, and Tejinder Singh, for "Information and the foundations of quantum theory".
A further five essays received Third Prize, receiving $2,000 each (and a Membership invitation where applicable), and ten other essays received Fourth Prize and $1,000. Visit this link to view the full list of winners.
I am also happy to announce that we have two Special Commendation Prizes to award this year. These prizes are chosen by our panel of experts to award "non-professional and/or non-academic" entrants, and come with a cash award of $1,000 each. (I need to emphasize that the panel is not able to evaluate all the entries in our contest, so these prizes do not mean that the panel necessarily ranked these entries above all others in terms of overall score. The panel did, though, find them to be good reads and worthy of commendation.)
This year, the panel chose to highlight a pair of student entries, commending them for the attempt to grapple with foundational questions.
Congratulations go to:
Jennifer Nielsen, for "Is Bit It?"
and
Xiong Wang, for "Bit: from Breaking symmetry of it".
On behalf of all the FQXi administration, I want to thank our cosponsers The Peter & Patricia Gruber Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation for making the contest possible. I also want to thank our media partner Scientific American for helping us put it all together and getting the word out.
And finally, all of us at FQXi want to say thank you to everyone who participated, including the authors of all entries, and everyone who stopped by the forums to read and discuss.
Here's to the next contest!