Complex products are not just arrangements of atoms that perform functions; rather, they are ordered arrangements of atoms that originated as imagination.

The irreversibility of time is the mechanism that brings order out of chaos. —ILYA PRIGOGINE

Transaction cost theory, or new institutional economics, is the branch of economics that studies the costs of transactions and the institutions that people develop to govern them. In simpler terms, it is the branch studying the cost of economic links and the ways in which people organize to deal with commercial interactions.

Our ability to transmit meaningful messages builds on the prior existence of meaningless forms of physical order. These meaningless forms of order are what information truly is.*

the steady state of out-of-equilibrium systems minimizes the production of entropy.6

Highly interacting out-of-equilibrium systems, whether they are trees reacting to the change of seasons or chemical systems processing information about the inputs they receive, teach us that matter can compute. These systems tell us that computation precedes the origins of life just as much as information does. The chemical changes encoded by thes

As the stadium example illustrated, the present state of a system constrains the possible paths that a system can take, and for a system to travel from disorder to order, many consecutive moves need to be made. Unfortunately, there are fewer paths leading a system from disorder to order than from order to disorder.

To hold large volumes of knowledge and knowhow, therefore, we need large networks of people. Yet the relationship between the size of a network and the volume of knowledge and knowhow that it can hold not only makes the accumulation of knowledge and knowhow difficult but also implies that moving or copying the knowledge and knowhow embodied in a la

Uncommon configurations of atoms, like a Bugatti or a guitar, embody more information than more common configurations of the same atoms, even though technically (and Shannon is right about this) communicating an ordered configuration and communicating a disordered configuration require the same amount of bits if we ignore the correlations that are