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,
Tag: physics
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
Julian Barbour: timeless complexity and the records of the universe
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
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
Physicist as librarian; Henri Poincaré’s intriguing metaphor
Among the new additions to Oxford University Press's admirable series of Very Short Introductions is a revised edition of J.L. Heilbron's VSI to the History of Physics. An interesting read in general, it raises one intriguing idea in particular; the metaphor of physicist as librarian. Libraries and documents feature throughout the book. Heilbron notes that… Continue reading Physicist as librarian; Henri Poincaré’s intriguing metaphor
Can information be conserved, and why would it matter?
The idea that information may be conserved may strike many of us interested in recorded human information information as faintly ridiculous. By 'conserved', we mean that there is a fixed amount of information in the universe, and that, while it may be changed, it can neither be created nor destroyed. This does not seem to… Continue reading Can information be conserved, and why would it matter?
The Occasional Informationist 