This is an adaption of an editorial to appear in Journal of Documentation, jointly written by myself and Lyn Robinson Ever since Rolf Landauer famously announced that “information is physical”, there has been an increasing tendency by scientists including David Deutsch, Seth Lloyd and Anton Zellinger to claim a place for information as a fundamental… Continue reading As long as we don’t pretend that it is science?
Category: science
Dr Nicholson and his metabolic maps
Many years ago, in another life, while I was studying organic chemistry, my eyes often wandered to the colourful and complicated maps of biochemical pathways which often hung in lecture rooms and laboratories. I’m sorry to say that I paid them little attention, other than to reflect that I was lucky to have avoided the… Continue reading Dr Nicholson and his metabolic maps
Remembering Ludvik Finkelstein
Rather belated, this posting marks the death in August this year of Ludwik Finkelstein, formerly Dean of Engineering at City University London. Finkelstein was born in Lvov in Poland (now Lviv in the Ukraine) in 1929, and seemed destined for a career in his family's iron and steel business. Like so many from that part… Continue reading Remembering Ludvik Finkelstein
The case for Pluto
The makers and maintainers of classifications, thesauri and other tools for indexing and arranging human knowledge have to tread a delicate balance. On the one hand, they want to keep things stable as much as possible; users are annoyed if major changes are made too often, particularly if it means that hapless librarians have to… Continue reading The case for Pluto
Portrait of the Author as a Young Information Scientist
I try not to talk too much about myself in this blog, but make an exception here. This post gives a brief account of how I came into the library/information professions, as a contribution to the excellent Library Routes project. When I was young, I was fascinated by science, and science fiction, and imagined I… Continue reading Portrait of the Author as a Young Information Scientist
On Space and Time, a bit informationally
A very nice new book On Space and Time, edited by Shahn Majid (Cambridge University Press), gives accounts of the current state of play in fundamental physics. Six authors, including a philosopher and a theologian as well as the expected physics/cosmology/mathematics representatives, give personal accounts of their take on the developing frontiers. Not very much,… Continue reading On Space and Time, a bit informationally
The Occasional Informationist 