in the famous Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The underlying mechanism proposed and developed by Zurek and his collaborators is known as quantum Darwinism. His work also has a lot of potential benefit to the emerging field of quantum computing. He is a pioneer in information physics, edited an influential book on "Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information", and spearheaded the efforts that finally exorcised Maxwell's demon. Zurek showed that the demon can extract energy from its environment for "free" as long as it (a) is able to find structure in the environment, and (b) is able to compress this pattern (whereas the remaining code is more succinct than the brute-force description of the structure). In this way the demon can exploit thermal fluctuations. However, he showed that in thermodynamic equilibrium (the most likely state of the environment), the demon can at best break even, even if the information about the environment is compressed. As a result of his exploration, Zurek suggested redefining entropy and distinguishing between two parts: the part that we already know about the environment (measured in Kolmogorov complexity), and, conditioned on our knowledge, the remaining uncertainty (measured in Shannon entropy). He is a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and also a Laboratory Fellow (a prestigious distinction for a US National Laboratory scientist). Zurek was awarded the Albert Einstein Professorship Prize by the Foundation of the University of Ulm in Germany in 2010. Honors 1996 Laboratory Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory 2004 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Lecturer 2005 Alexander von Humboldt Prize 2009 Fellow of the American Physical Society 2009 Marian Smoluchowski Medal, highest prize of the Polish Physical Society 2010 Albert-Einstein Professorship, honorary professorship at the University of Ulm 2012 Order of Polonia Restituta, the Commander's Cross - one of Poland's highest Orders 2014 Los Alamos Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory Books as editor with John Wheeler: Quantum theory of measurement. Princeton University Press 1983 ; 2014 edition as editor with A. van der Merwe, W. A. Miller: Between Quantum and Cosmos. Princeton University Press, 1988 as editor: Complexity, Entropy and Physics of Information. Addison-Wesley 1990; as editor with J. J. Halliwell, J. Pérez-Mercader: Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1994 as editor with H. Arodz and J. Dziarmaga: Patterns of Symmetry Breaking, NATO ASI series volume (Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, 2003) ;