You might be interested to learn that Einstein's two famous papers from 1905 formally cited no other works.
I'm not going to conclusively pass judgement on the paper above, but I think anything that approaches the idea of big problems in fundamental physics from an informational point of view is highly interesting.
Does that sound too general for you? What I mean by that is: information is itself a fundamental entity of reality perhaps underlying many others. Not in an abstract way, but in a physically 'real' way. That information, is the fundamental unit. And not in a thermodynamic entropy / microstate ensembles / useful description type of way, but in an 'the is actually the underlying basis and opens up new physics' kind of way.
I'm not sure how the above paper approaches it (I have not read it), but what would a theory of mass, light and gravity rewritten in terms of information, maybe with shades of Shannon, look like?
I encourage readers of this comment to resist the tempting but easy path of curtailing a strawman of possible meanings of that into something you think is dumb for a mere self-satisfying fake pay off, but rather to take the interesting and curious path of it as a leaping off point of inspiration to open your imagination about what it could be. Good luck! :)
1. Himself, four times,
2. A mathematician for a restatement of Stokes' theorem (which he introduces kind of mysteriously in the first place), and
3. Three non-peer reviewed books from 1893(!), 1968, and 1992
so this pretty much goes to 11 on the crank scale
(Yes the 1893 is Heaviside and yes I've cited fundamental results that old but he's already hanging by a thread here)