Dust in space and documentation

Citation

Bawden, D. (2008), "Dust in space and documentation", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 64 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd.2008.27864aaa.001

Dust in space and documentation

In early August 2007, a number of newspapers carried dramatic headlines such as “Dust ‘comes alive’ in space” (Boone, 2007). These reported the findings of a study showing that galactic dust could form spontaneously into helical structures, with the possibility of reproducing themselves through information transfer, and could “contain a code comparable to the genetic information held in organic matter”, and could be the basis for a kind of “weird life” (Boone, 2007).

This came at a particularly timely moment for me, as I read this article while on the way to the CoLIS 6 (Conceptions of Library and Information Science) conference, to present a paper proposing a view of information as a unified concept, spanning the physical, biological and human worlds (Bawden, 2007a). The article provided a valuable source of quotations to introduce the presentation.

The article on which the newspapers stories were based (Tsytovich et al., 2007) gives the more detailed perspective computer simulations suggest that complex plasmas may self-organise into a complex state of interacting helical structures, which exhibit many features thought to be peculiar to life, including the storage and transmission of information between “generations”, and a form of “memory”. The authors suggest that this may be confirmed by experiments in space, or detected by telescopic observations, and that this possibility should inform our ideas of what “life” may be, and hence the way in which SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) is carried out. (For comments on this, including some scepticism, see Battersby (2007)).

Fascinating though this may be, does it have any relation to “information” as it is understood in the library/information sciences ? Even less likely, perhaps, does it have any potential relevance for our discipline and professions?

The answer to that question will depend on whether one sees “our” kind of information as being a thing in itself, quite distinct, except in very general and trivial ways, from that which is called information in the physical and biological sciences. This view is the more usual, and is espoused, for example, by Floridi (2005), for whom information is “meaningful data” and by Hjørland (2007), for whom it is “any difference that makes a difference”. To this subjective and human-centred view of information, the “information” in space dust cannot have any direct relevance.

An alternative viewpoint exists: authors such as Stonier (1997) and Bates (2006) have argued that real and meaningful inks – most strongly, evolutionary links – may be seen between the concept of information in the physical, biological and human domains. I have followed this approach (Bawden, 2007b), suggesting that information may be regarded as form of self-organised complexity in the physical world, from which the emergent properties of meaning in context and understanding appear in the biological and human realms respectively. For those who incline to this view, the space dust will have quite a different significance: it is a form of information on a spectrum towards the kind with which we are primarily concerned, and its study may have lessons for our own disciplines.

And perhaps the reverse … I have tentatively suggested (Bawden, 2007b) that the most intriguing aspect of a unified view of the concept of information is the idea that the findings of research and scholarship in the information sciences may have applicability and value in the physical and biological sciences, as they become more “information centric”.

Perhaps the space dust has something to learn from us.

David Bawden