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
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,
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 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
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
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
The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination (Albert Einstein) As you no doubt know, this year marks the hundredth anniversary of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, first presented by him in 1915 to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Even among physics enthusiasts, general relativity has a daunting reputation, largely because of its… Continue reading Albert’s imagination and the significance of information
The Occasional Informationist 