The secret code of everything: How tiny bits build our world

Have you ever wondered what everything you have around you has in common? Your favorite game, the photo of your pet on your phone, the weather forecast, and even the thoughts in your brain—they all share the same secret ingredient. It's called information.

What is information?

Information is basically anything that tells you something you didn't know before.

When your friend texts you "meet at the park at 3pm," that's information. When you see dark clouds in the sky, that's information too (time to grab an umbrella!).

All information, no matter what it is, can be broken down into the tiniest possible pieces.

Think about LEGO bricks. You can build a spaceship, a castle, or a dragon using the same basic blocks, right? Information works the same way, but its building blocks are even simpler. They're called bits.

Meet the bit: the smallest piece of information

A bit is the simplest possible answer to the simplest possible question. It's either a yes or a no. A 1 or a 0. On or off. True or false. That's it!

Sounds boring? Wait until you see what you can do with them.

Imagine you're playing a guessing game. Your friend is thinking of a number between 1 and 100, and you need to figure it out by asking yes-or-no questions. Each answer gives you one bit of information! "Is it bigger than 50?" Yes. "Is it bigger than 75?" No. With just seven smart questions (seven bits), you can pinpoint any number from 1 to 100. Pretty powerful for something so simple!

How bits build everything digital

Your computer screen isn't actually showing you colors and pictures—it's just switching millions of tiny lights on and off incredibly fast. Each light is a bit. Eight bits together make a byte, which is enough to represent a single letter. The letter "A" is stored as 01000001. The letter "B" is 01000010. String enough of these together, and you've got this entire blog post!

Photos? Your phone breaks them into millions of tiny dots called pixels, and each pixel's color is just a bunch of bits saying how much red, green, and blue to mix together.

Videos are just thousands of photos shown so fast your eyes think things are moving.

Information + Math = Science Magic

Here's where it connects to everything you might study in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM):

• In Biology: Your DNA is like nature's computer code! It uses four "letters" (A, T, C, G) instead of two, but the idea is the same—a long string of simple symbols that contains all the instructions to build... you. Scientists can now read this code and understand how living things work.

• In Physics: Scientists discovered that even the tiniest particles in the universe behave like they're following information rules. Some physicists think the whole universe might actually be information at its deepest level. Mind-blowing, right?

• In Engineering: Whether you're designing a bridge or a smartphone, you need to process information—measurements, calculations, plans. Engineers use bits to simulate and test their ideas on computers before building anything in real life.

• In Chemistry: When molecules interact, they're basically exchanging information about their structure and properties. Computers help chemists predict how different substances will react by crunching through billions of bits of data.

AI: teaching computers to learn

Now for an interesting part—Artificial Intelligence. AI is what happens when we teach computers to find patterns in huge amounts of information, kind of like how you learned to recognise your friends' faces without anyone giving you a rulebook.

Let's say you want to teach a computer to recognise pictures of cats. You show it thousands and thousands of cat photos (that's a lot of bits—millions and millions).

The AI looks for patterns: "Cats usually have pointy ears. They often have whiskers. Their eyes look like this." It's making tiny adjustments to billions of numbers (bits again!) until it gets better and better at saying "cat" or "not cat."

The same basic idea lets AI write stories, play chess, help doctors spot diseases in X-rays, and yes, even have conversations with you. It's all patterns in information, built from those same simple bits.

Why this matters for your future

Understanding that information is the fundamental building block of our digital world is like having X-ray vision into how things really work. When you know this secret, you realise that:

• Programming isn't magic—it's just giving very specific instructions using patterns of bits

• Data isn't boring—it's captured information waiting to reveal hidden patterns

• Technology isn't mysterious—it's tools we built to process information faster than our brains can

Every app you use, every game you play, every scientific discovery being made right now—they're all dancing patterns of bits, zipping around at the speed of light.

Your turn to explore

So here's a challenge for you: start noticing information everywhere. When you listen to music, remember it's just numbers describing sound waves. When you use a map app, think about how it's processing millions of bits about roads and traffic. When you learn something new, realise your brain is storing that as connections between neurons—biological information processing.

The universe is made of information, and now you know its secret code. What are you going to build with it?

Want to experiment? Try writing your name in binary code (that's the 1s and 0s language). Or make up your own simple code where different patterns mean different things. That's how every digital system started—with someone figuring out clever ways to arrange simple bits into complex, useful information. Maybe the next breakthrough will be yours.

Keep exploring!

Ribbit, ribbit,

Frobo