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In Defence of Computer Science develops new engineering approaches and experimental propositions on the basis of some logical, philosophical and physical axioms and hypotheses. The main ones, which are framed by careful thought about issues in engineering and the philosophy of science, can be summarised as:

• A computable function is one that creates no new information. Analogue computation can be specified by choosing a real-numbered theory on which to parameterise the main information-theoretic kernel, which avoids Turing machines and equivalent formalisms.
• Engineering specifications, physics and logics can be considered as ‘preservative extensional causal theories,’ which can be framed using sets but are more naturally thought of as topologies.
• Computation and the reversible part of physics are (homotopy) equivalent, by extension of the Curry-Howard correspondence (which equates computation to proof in a natural deduction style).
• Thermodynamics and the holographic principle are correct without modification or exception.
• Thermodynamic entropy is self-information and monotonically increases.
• Reality is not continuous evolution of material state, but graph-structured with the information content of vertices affected by continuous evolution under logical existential quantification. Most of physics is invariant under this change of perspective. Continuous material is an artefact of perception like the frames of an animation (temporally) or vector graphics (spatially).
• This philosophical paradigm shift gives rise to the idea of resultant inertial mass being reduced by an information metric on this graph, which has the overall structure of a join-semilattice (essentially a tree with joining branches). The book covers a number of details, such as how bound particles and their internal mass ratios should behave according to the theory. Something very like Lemaître's primaeval particle emerges from the resulting schema at the lattice supremum.