A Model for John Wheeler's It from Bit

This book describes a model — the Holographic Circlette framework1 — which we believe is a working realisation of Wheeler’s vision. The framework starts with an eight-bit register at every point of a discrete three-dimensional lattice, applies four parity-check rules (the kind familiar from error-correcting codes in classical computing), and a single controlled-NOT gate (the kind familiar from quantum computing). From these ingredients — and from no others — the framework produces: • All forty-five fermions of the Standard Model (six quarks in three colours plus three leptons, in three generations); • The cancellation of all six gauge anomalies that the Standard Model requires for self-consistency; • The charged-lepton mass ratios (electron, muon, tau) to seven significant figures; • The weak mixing angle to within one half of one percent; • The fine-structure constant α≈1/137 to three parts per billion; • The proton mass, the rho-meson mass, the hydrogen Lamb shift, the helium binding energy; • The cosmological constant, the Planck mass, the dark-energy equation of state. It does this with one free parameter — the Planck length ℓP ≈1.6 ×10−35 m, which sets the absolute size of the lattice. Every other physical quantity is a dimensionless ratio calculated from the substrate structure, multiplied by an appropriate power of ℓP. If the framework is correct, then Wheeler was right. The universe is made of bits.