What is Energy?

E=MC2. That’s energy and that’s all there is to it, or at least that’s as far as most of us go in our understanding of this underlying force in the universe. MIT researcher Norm Margolus–a self-described lover of the physics of information and computation, and the informational modeling of physics–says there’s a lot more to energy than its raw power. In fact, energy is a building block, much like other universal forces, that can be understood in concrete terms that will drive much of science’s future investigations. Norm discusses advances in the study of energy on Wednesday night, February 4 at 6:00 pm at Santa Fe Complex.

Margolus is a pioneer explorer in the world of computer storage and speed. The author of “Cellular Automata Machines“, which explores the “computer scientist’s counterpart to the physicist’s concept of ‘field’ “, and founder of Permabit, a “massively scalable enterprise disk-based archive” company based in Cambridge, MA.

He is particularly interested in the relationship between digital information, physics and nature. He says they share common characteristics such as being constructed of finite building blocks that combine and recombine to create the impression of an image on a computer or a physical object like a leaf or a face. “As we zoom in on a digital image, we begin to notice that there isn’t an infinite amount of resolution: We begin to see the pixels,” he wrote in a presentation on physics and the computer. “Something similar happens in nature. A box full of particles doesn’t have an infinite number of different configurations: The number of distinct configurations is finite.”

Norm Margolus is a research affiliate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ( For more information on his work, visit his website.)