Understanding Information and Computation: From Einstein to Web Science

Most would acknowledge the World Wide Web to be a truly astounding thing. It has changed the ways in which we interact, learn and innovate. It is also the largest socio-technical system mankind has ever created and is advancing at a pace that leaves most spectators in awe. Indeed it is an unavoidable fact that the future of the world is now inextricably linked to the future of the World Wide Web. Almost every day it appears to change, to become 'better' and increase its hold on us. Yet for all this we are starting to see underlying stability emerge. The way that Web sites rank in terms of popularity, for example, appears to follow laws that we have known about for some time. But what is fascinating is that these laws were first discovered not in fields like computer science or information technology. Rather they were first noticed in what we might think to be more fundamental disciplines like biology, physics and mathematics. Consequently the Web, it seems, although synthetic at its surface, is quite 'natural' deeper down, and one of the driving aims of the new field of Web Science is to discover just how far down such naturalness goes. If the Web is natural to its core then that raises some particularly fundamental questions. It forces us, for example, to ask if the central properties of the Web might be more elemental than the truths we cling to from our understandings of the physical world. In essence it demands that we question the very nature of information itself. This book is all about such demands and one possible route though to some truly different and potentially mind-blowing answers.