Tom Siegfried, the science editor of The Dallas Morning News, invites the general reader to come to a personal conclusion. Here force is a key concept, and energy, kinetic and potential, first appears as a conserved quantity. Energy, the key concept, is conserved, but entropy, or useless heat energy, increases, so the universe is running down. The third, motivated by the computer, the dominant machine of today, sees the universe as a large information processor. Entropy is information.
Information has a precise definition as the state of a system.
An information processor, a computer, is a system that transforms its state, according to rules, into a new state. Do not underestimate the import of all this. Information is real. Information is physical,'' Siegfried writes. And the progression of events through time is computation, so the universe is essentially a huge, if mysterious, computer.