The nature of information has been reviewed and analysed many times, and from different perspectives, as noted in a previous article by myself and Lyn Robinson. New reviews can always give new insight, and a particularly illuminating one is given by Luke Tredinnick from the School of Computing and Digital Media at London Metropolitan University,… Continue reading Information re-reviewed
Category: information theories and philosophies
Dark matter and information revisited
In a previous post, I described as "over excited" the idea that the mysterious "dark matter", that hypothetical form of matter that does not interact with light, and which is invoked to explain anomalous astronomical observations, may be, in some sense, "raw" information, unattached to conventional matter. Remarkably enough, a new theoretical approach initiated by the theoretical physicist… Continue reading Dark matter and information revisited
Why everything is complex
A recent article in Quanta magazine reminds us of the on-going interest in a rather startling proposal regarding the status of information, its relation to complexity, in the physical and biological realms. This proposes that complexity increases over time, inexorably and inevitably, in the physical universe as well as in living systems. It was, and… Continue reading Why everything is complex
Entropy. How little we (still) know,
Entropy, and its complex and subtle relations with information, has been an interest of mine for a long while, a paper on the subject being updated by posts on this blog. Since the last blog post, a number of interesting ideas have been put forward. The first is not really new, having been made available… Continue reading Entropy. How little we (still) know,
Zipf’s Law and the mathematics of the physical world
Zipf's law, and the family of associated power laws, which govern the frequency distribution of words in natural language, and many other things, are well known in the information sciences as the foundations of bibliometrics. An intriguing new study by a group of physicists from Oxford, Paris, and Portsmouth, reported in a paper in the… Continue reading Zipf’s Law and the mathematics of the physical world
Solving the Hawking paradox and conserving information
One of the great controversies of modern physics, Stephen Hawking’s ‘black hole paradox’, considers what happens to the information contained in anything dropped into a black hole. The matter disappears from our universe; the black hole increases in mass, but that tells us nothing about the nature of what has gone in; it, and the… Continue reading Solving the Hawking paradox and conserving information
Content in an age of GenAI: Floridi on implications and directions
Readers of this blog will know that I regard Luciano Floridi as one of the more insightful guides to the conceptual issues of a rapidly changing information environment, and his philosophy of information as a valuable basis for library/information science. In an open access editorial in Philosophy and Technology (31st August 2024), Floridi explores the… Continue reading Content in an age of GenAI: Floridi on implications and directions
Haxells Strand Palace [Old London]
At first sight, the modern, if Art Deco influenced, ambience of Haxells restaurant, within the Strand Palace Hotel, does not suggest Old London. But there is an interesting backstory. The hotel itself dates back to 1909, but took its present form in the 1920s, with a redesign in Art Deco style. The expanded hotel incorporated… Continue reading Haxells Strand Palace [Old London]
“A truly inherent property”: information in genetics
One of my long-standing interests has been informational gap-bridging, examining different conceptions of information, and how they may manifest in the physical and biological sciences. Ideas of information as a component of the biological sciences have grown steadily since Lila Gatlin's pioneering studies of the information content of the genetic code. In an open access… Continue reading “A truly inherent property”: information in genetics
The weight of information
The status of the concept of information in the physical world, and in particular its relation to entropy, continues to attract discussion and controversy. A relation between information and physical entropy, and hence energy, was first shown by Leo Szilard, while Rolf Landauer and Charles Bennett later showed that erasing information has an inescapable energy… Continue reading The weight of information
The Occasional Informationist 