The British physicist Julian Barbour is one of those admirable people who, having gained his PhD, realised that concentration on research and scholarship is incompatible with working in the modern university, and has had a very successful career as an independent researcher in the foundations of physics. Most notably, starting from the observation that we… Continue reading Julian Barbour: timeless complexity and the records of the universe
Category: science
Dataome rising
Caleb Scharf, an astronomer and astrobiologist, is the latest in a series of authors to give an account of the new recognition of information as a significant, and objective, feature of the world, in his The Ascent of Information. The book gives an overview of the concept of information, not dissimilar to James Gleick's The Information… Continue reading Dataome rising
Changing classifications
When teaching and writing about the classification of documents ('bibliographic classification'), I try to remember to make the point that document classifications very often draw from, and less often contribute to, more general classifications and taxonomies of knowledge, and of entities in the physical world. So it is worth keeping an eye on classification in… Continue reading Changing classifications
Equations, images, understanding?
In previous posts, I have touched on understanding, and the complementary nature of conscious human understanding and the more opaque, to us at least, understanding produced by AI systems. Such systems, particularly those described as deep-learning, produce an 'understanding' of large and complex data sets, but without employing the kind of concepts on which humans… Continue reading Equations, images, understanding?
The distant thing imagined
The title of this post comes from a 2016 item on Paul Gilster Centauri Dreams blog, in which he discusses some of the unexpected discoveries about the former planet Pluto coming from NASA's New Horizons probe, particularly its atmosphere and its geological activity. Gilster writes of "that interesting interplay between the distant thing imagined and… Continue reading The distant thing imagined
Unveiling of nature or social creativity: classification and discovery in astronomy: updated
Updated May 2019 Steven Dick has written an article on this topic, focusing on the classification itself, for the Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization: Astronomy's Three Kingdom System: a comprehensive classification system of celestial objects (2019). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It has always interested me to see how the development of ideas of classification and categorisation in the information… Continue reading Unveiling of nature or social creativity: classification and discovery in astronomy: updated
Still waiting for Carnot: information and complexity
Back in 2015, Lyn Robinson and I published an article in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology [1], which gave an analysis of the relation between information and complexity, showing that ideas of complexity, organization, and 'interesting order', were intertwined with concepts of information, and of entropy. In particular, we noted… Continue reading Still waiting for Carnot: information and complexity
Deep down things revisited: information and physics
This post gives an update on the development of the idea of information as a constituent of the physical world, and is a companion piece to earlier posts on information in the biological domain, on the conservation of information, on quantum information, and on the theory of relativity and its informational component. All are expressions… Continue reading Deep down things revisited: information and physics
Still awaiting the quantum turn: updated
Updated May 2019 Since this post was published, there has been an increasing interest in reformulating quantum mechanics in informational terms: an accessible introduction is given in an article in Quanta magazine by Philip Ball. Those who want to have a look at more technical examples might try a classic paper on an informational derivation… Continue reading Still awaiting the quantum turn: updated
What is life redux; information and biology
Readers of this blog will know that one of my interests is the links there may be between conceptions of information in different domains; see the Mind the Gap paper by myself and Lyn Robinson. The concept of information, albeit understood in rather different ways, seems to be gaining increasing acceptance in both the physical… Continue reading What is life redux; information and biology
The Occasional Informationist 