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Hans Christian von Baeyer Quotes

Hans Christian von Baeyer is a Chancellor Professor of Physics at the College of William and Mary. His books include Information: The New Language of Science, Warmth Disperses and Time Passes: The History of Heat and QBism: The Future of Quantum Physics.

Recipient of the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Magazine Award, which cites his "uncommon literary grace". He also received the 2005 Andrew Gemant Award for science writing, for prose "crisp, captivating and illuminating" with "depth, passion and clarity" in the ideas conveyed. Wikipedia  

✵ 1938
Hans Christian von Baeyer: 25 quotes0 likes

Famous Hans Christian von Baeyer Quotes

“The problem of defining exactly what is meant by the signal velocity, which cropped up as long ago as 1907, has not been solved.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 15, Ultimate Speed, The information speed limit, p. 135

“Science has taught us that what we see and touch is not what is really there.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 5, Abstraction, Beyond concrete reality, p. 35

“If the intensity of the material world is plotted along the horizontal axis, and the response of the human mind is on the vertical, the relation between the two is represented by the logarithmic curve. Could this rule provide a clue to the relationship between the objective measure of information, and our subjective perception of it?”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 10, Counting Digits, The ubiquitous logarithm, p. 85

“The smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 12, Randomness, The flip side of information, p. 104

“If quantum communication and quantum computation are to flourish, a new information theory will have to be developed.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 25, Zeilingers Principle, Information at the root of reality, p. 231

“This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 22, Quantum Computing, Putting qubits to work, p. 203

Hans Christian von Baeyer Quotes about the trip

“Time has been called God's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once. In the same spirit, noise is Nature's way of making sure that we don't find out everything that happens. Noise, in short, is the protector of information.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

von Baeyer did not originate the quip about time, which dates back at least as far as the 1929 book &quot;The Man Who Mastered Time&quot; by Ray Cummings, where it appears on p. 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=YdZEAAAAYAAJ&amp;q=%22everything+from+happening+at+once%22#search_anchor. <br class="br">Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 14, Noise, Nuisance and necessity, p. 127-128

“Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, invented a way to measure 'the amount of information' in a message without defining the word 'information' itself, nor even addressing the question of the meaning of the message.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 4, Counting Bits, The scientific measure of information, p. 28

“To put it one way, a collection of Shakespeare's plays is richer than a phone book that uses the same number of letters; to put it another, the essence of information lies in the relationships among bits, not their sheer number.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 17, Bioinformatics, Biology meets information technology, p. 145

“Entropy is not about speeds or positions of particles, the way temperature and pressure and volume are, but about our lack of information.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 11, The Message on the Tombstone, The meaning of entropy, p. 97-98

Hans Christian von Baeyer Quotes

“Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 23, Black Holes, Where information goes to hide, p. 204
Context: Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense.

“If you don't understand something, break it apart; reduce it to its components. Since they are simpler than the whole, you have a much better chance of understanding them; and when you have succeeded in doing that, put the whole thing back together again.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 7, A Battle Among Giants, Reductionism and emergence, p. 54

“As every bookie knows instinctively, a number such as reliability - a qualitative rather than a quantitative measure - is needed to make the valuation of information practically useful.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 24, Bits, Bucks, Hits and Nuts, Information theory beyond Shannon, p. 221

“The solution of the Monty Hall problem hinges on the concept of information, and more specifically, on the relationship between added information and probability.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 9, Figuring the Odds, How probability measures information, p. 70

“An electron is real; a probability is not.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 19, The Quantum Gadget, Quantum weirdness brought to light, p. 172

“In order to understand information, we must define it; bit in order to define it, we must first understand it. Where to start?”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 3, In-Formation, The roots of the concept, p. 18

“Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 1, Electric Rain, Information in our lives, p. 3

“We don't know what energy is, any more than we know what information is, but as a now robust scientific concept we can describe it in precise mathematical terms, and as a commodity we can measure, market, regulate and tax it.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 2, The Spell of Democritus, Why information will transform physics, p. 11

“Underneath the shifting appearances of the world as perceived by our unreliable senses, is there, or is there not, a bedrock of objective reality?”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 8, The Oracle of Copenhagen, Science is about information, p. 64

“Nowhere is the difference between either/or and both/and more clearly apparent than in the context of information.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 20, A Game of Beads, The wonder of quantum superposition, p. 182

“Both induction and deduction, reasoning from the particular and the general, and back again from the universal to the specific, form the essence to scientific thinking.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 16, Unpacking Information, The computer in the service of physics, p. 138

“As with all quantum devices, a qubit is a delicate flower. If you so much as look at it, you destroy it.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 21, The Qubit, Information in the quantum age, p. 187

“In fact, an information theory that leaves out the issue of noise turns out to have no content.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 13, Electric Information, From Morse to Shannon, p. 121

“The switch from 'steam engines' to 'heat engines' signals the transition from engineering practice to theoretical science.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 18, Information is Physical, The cost of forgetting, p. 154

“Numbers instill a feeling for the lie of the land, and furnish grist for the mathematical mill that is the physicist's principal tool.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 6, The Book of Life, Genetic information, p. 48

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