chronological study of how the concept of “information” — originally introduced by Claude Shannon (1948) as a mathematical measure of reduced uncertainty — turned into a physical category claiming the status of a fundamental entity. Seven key stages are identified: background (Maxwell’s demon, Szilard); Shannon’s information theory and his forgotten warnings; Wiener’s cybernetics; Landauer’s principle (1961–1991) — the transition from an engineering result to the slogan “information is physical”; black hole thermodynamics (Bekenstein, Hawking) and the birth of the information paradox; Wheeler’s radical ontologisation of information (“It from Bit”); and the growing criticism in 2010–2024 (Alicki, Timpson, Aaronson, Lairez, Janich). The mechanisms that entrenched the misconception are analysed: forgetting of original warnings, legitimation through authority, the convenience of metaphor, substitution of the weak thesis for the strong one, and the lack of systematic criticism in the mainstream. It is shown that fundamental physical theories can be formulated without the concept of information. Regarding the black hole information paradox, the author acknowledges that most physicists consider it a real problem, but notes that the paradox itself arises only when information is ontologised. The conclusion is that the “snowball” of erroneous conclusions can be stopped by returning to a strict separation between physics and informatiology. Keywords: information, physics, methodology of science, Landauer’s principle, information paradox, chronology.
Alexander Yourievitch Kotelnikov (Sun,) studied this question.