Reddit mentions of It From Bit or Bit From It?: On Physics and Information (The Frontiers Collection)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-field-theory/#Field

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/#OntStrReaOSR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics

http://www.amazon.com/Every-Thing-Must-Metaphysics-Naturalized/dp/0199573093/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1456405155&sr=1-2&keywords=everything+must+go+science

https://www.amazon.com/Bit-Physics-Information-Frontiers-Collection/dp/3319129457/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1465986246&sr=1-1&keywords=it+from+bit

Not that wikipedia is a good source, but it actually explains modern quantum field theory pretty well in the first few sentences. Which is good for context before moving into sep articles. In short, particles aren't tiny balls like people thought 150 years ago. Fundamental particles don't have size at all, but are points. Their only properties are effectively describable as something like data or information. The basic thing in existence is "fields" which are universe wide systems of interaction, and energy is basically just something a field is doing in a specific place. Fundamental particles are just a special excited energy state. Whats more, you can't really think of the information in the place as a distinct "thing" since it only exists in relation as a system.

Of curse the fact that they have no size is no problem for us. Because they can still be distances apart form each-other and relate in ways that add up to structure. And the field and energy is more structure itself rather than a "thing" because its all just a system of relations. Energy is just "capacity to do work." Yet is also the fundamental thing that exists in fields. Which sounds abstract until you begin thinking of it as information or data. And so this "capacity" is an abstraction that can be in a specific place. Since things change based on what is around them (gravity, etc) its even hypothesized that every point in space theoretically has information about everything else in the universe in it.

Physicalism is the generic modern term to replace the term materialism, but the more important term is ontic structural realism. Which is basically the position of taking physics as it is and saying that what it tells us is true. Which at this point means that all that exists is "structure" instead of matter. The term matter is only used now to refer to things that structurally add up to molecules and so then act like what classical matter was thought to. So it is a construct we use to make sense of the world, rather than anything real. Since to the chemist these abstract differences about molecular physics don't matter much to a to of macro scale practice.

Note of course that there's ambiguity here. The only properties fundamental things have are something like data or information. But is this information the same thing as what we normally use the word information to refer to in physics? Is it something else? Are these properties literally nothing but mathematical properties, or are they only isomorphic to them in some way? Is what we see something that exhausts existence, or is it an unfolded version of a more fundamental existence as in the physicist bohm's idea of implicate and explicate order? The truth is that there's more or less an absolute limit on our ability to answer some of these questions with pure science, because past a certain level, we can only get information about things indirectly. We don't even know why chemical structure is able to exist despite violating some of the principles of quantum physics. Since electrons shouldn't really be acting in the ways they seem to in electron bonds, and we can only see what's happening indirectly due to inability to directly see things on that scale. All of reality emerges from things we can only see indirectly, and so there's a limit to what we can say about it. After all, how can you "see" something that has no size?

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Also, this is unrelated but there's many metaphysical questions that still exist despite science. Metaphysics isn't an alternate way to find things out from science. Its trying to answer slightly different questions, but with overlap in the middle on ones that both contribute to. For instance, philosophy of identity is something that science can help, but which also needs more work beyond just describing science.