irregular thoughts on the information sciences
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
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
I have never really liked the seventeenth century; maybe after having to study it at school, seemingly interminably. Rather too much plague, fire, civil war, religious persecution, and Dutchmen doing bad things on the Medway. Yes, of course, Christopher Wren and Isaac Newton, but even so. Sometimes, however, reading a single book can change one's… Continue reading London and the 17th century
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 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
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
The relation between natural history and human history is an interesting one, particularly if a bit of information history can be worked in. Two books published in 2023 take very different and contrasting approaches to this topic. Peter Frankopan's The earth transformed: an untold history is one of those works for which the phrase "big… Continue reading A volcanic earth transformed
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 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
As readers of this blog will know, one of my enduring interests is how the concept of information appears in different domains. One aspect of this is the much-studied relation between information and the complex, and the multi-faceted, and arguably over-used, concept of entropy; see an older paper for background. Interest in this topic shows… Continue reading “A delicate tension between physics and information”; information and entropy revisited
The Occasional Informationist 