University of Pennsylvania Physicist Vijay Balasubramanian recently spoke with Quanta Magazine on the roles of information in physics and neuroscience, as well as human cognition.

Bala Cynwyd resident Balasubramanian is finding connections between literature, neuroscience, computer science, physics, and the humanities.

“I am interested in how natural systems manipulate and process information, producing new forms of self-organization,” he says.

Balasubramanian and his colleagues research the construction of black holes, which is noted as “which is a measure of ignorance or lack of information,” and have found there is definitely something “linking area, entropy and information.”

“We must be willing to open our minds to more subtle ideas of space, which is hard because our imaginations are closely tied to our daily experience as large animals,” says Balasubramanian, who has studied physics and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Vijay Balasubramanian and his colleagues study in part quantum bits (also known as qubits), so they dubbed the theories of black hole research “it from qubit.”

The physicist also leads a research group at Penn that delves into how the brain has been sculpted by the world’s physical features.

Vijay Balasubramanian has B.Sc. degrees in Physics and Computer Science from M.I.T. and has received an M.S. in Computer Science from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Princeton University.

Read more about University of Pennsylvania Physicist Vijay Balasubramanian interview in Quanta Magazine.

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