The internet is changing the way people interact, how students are educated and is in the process of transforming societies everywhere. And yet, the whole is so new that no one has had time to really investigate its nature, to examine what underlies the emergent properties that impact on us all. To understand the nature of the internet requires an examination of its fundamental properties and how the various parts interact. This type of examination has come to be known as Web Science, and Philip Tetlow was one the earliest and best known of its proponents.
Web Science starts from the premise that anything as complicated as the internet must behave in a similar way to living organisms and must be subject to the physical laws of the universe. In other words, even though it is a concept, a manifestation of multiple independent technologies, procedures and rules, it can and must be thought of as an object.
Tetlow starts by examining the nature of information. And that is the stepping off point for a radical and controversial theory of everything, how information depends on the quantum nature of the universe, how all computation is ultimately mathematical and can be transformed into other things. The book covers an immense field, ranging across computer science, mathematics, quantum mechanics and the philosophy of mind. It does not attempt a strict scientific treatment with hypotheses and proof. It is more a sort of informed speculation, looking at odd bits of the information space and pointing out how very odd they in fact are, and proposing novel ways of looking at them.
However, many will take exception to the apparent lapses in logic and to the constantly shifting perspectives advanced. The book samples many areas of science and mathematics, gravitation, dark matter, multidimensional geometry, amongst many, to make its points and draws on the latest current theories. Not all of this stands up to scrutiny. For example, much of the later sections are based around string theory and speculates how that can be used understand the nature of computation. Unfortunately, the work at the Large Hadron Collider has pretty much exploded string theory, so this book has to be counted among the injured bystanders.
The arguments sometimes need a fair bit of mathematical knowledge to follow but are in the main well written and accessible to the general reader. Anyone looking for intellectual challenge and a provocative view of the world of tomorrow will find it here. Whether the arguments advanced are convincing or not, they are certainly stimulating.
