Information: The New Language of Science

Portada
Harvard University Press, 2004 - 258 pàgines

Confronting us at every turn, flowing from every imaginable source, information defines our era--and yet what we don't know about it could--and does--fill a book. In this indispensable volume, a primer for the information age, Hans Christian von Baeyer presents a clear description of what information is, how concepts of its measurement, meaning, and transmission evolved, and what its ever-expanding presence portends for the future.

Information is poised to replace matter as the primary stuff of the universe, von Baeyer suggests; it will provide a new basic framework for describing and predicting reality in the twenty-first century. Despite its revolutionary premise, von Baeyer's book is written simply in a straightforward fashion, offering a wonderfully accessible introduction to classical and quantum information. Enlivened with anecdotes from the lives of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists who have contributed significantly to the field, Information conducts readers from questions of subjectivity inherent in classical information to the blurring of distinctions between computers and what they measure or store in our quantum age. A great advance in our efforts to define and describe the nature of information, the book also marks an important step forward in our ability to exploit information--and, ultimately, to transform the nature of our relationship with the physical universe.

 

Continguts

Information in our lives
3
Why information will transform physics
11
The roots of the concept
18
The scientific measure of information
28
Beyond concrete reality
35
Genetic information
42
Reductionism and emergence
54
Science is about information
61
The information speed limit
129
The computer in the service of physics
136
Biology meets information technology
145
The cost of forgetting
153
Quantum weirdness brought
163
The wonder of superposition
175
Information in the quantum age
183
Putting qubits to work
193

Classical Information
66
How probability measures information
69
The ubiquitous logarithm
81
The meaning of entropy
90
The flip side of information
99
From Morse to Shannon
111
Nuisance and necessity
122
Where information goes to hide
204
Information theory beyond
215
Information at the root of reality
222
Notes
235
Index
248
Copyright

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Sobre l'autor (2004)

Hans Christian von Baeyer is Chancellor Professor of Physics at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. In the course of his career he has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, served as Director of the Virginia Associated REsearch Campus - an interdisciplinary research laboratory which became the nucleus of the Jefferson Lab (the world's premier electron accelerator facility for nuclear physics) - and garnered numerous awards for his scientiric writing. His previous books include Taming the Atom, Rainbows, Snowflakes and Quarks, and Warmth Disperses and Time Passes.

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