Information is physical

Rolf Landauer, 1961: irreversible computation generates heat. Information is not an ethereal extra. It is a physical quantity with a bill.

John Wheeler, decades later, pressed the more ambitious slogan: it from bit: that every particle, every field, even the spacetime continuum, derives its function, meaning, and existence from binary answers to yes-or-no questions.

You do not have to accept Wheeler’s metaphysics to accept Landauer’s cost. The tree hangs a modest leaf here: any simulation of a world has a physical price, in whatever substrate is doing the rendering. That fact links physics to computation without yet answering whether we are the render.