Hans Christian von Baeyer: Information

“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 "The Man Who Mastered Time" by Ray Cummings, where it appears on p. 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=YdZEAAAAYAAJ&q=%22everything+from+happening+at+once%22#search_anchor.
Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 14, Noise, Nuisance and necessity, p. 127-128

God , Way , Nature , Time

“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

Problem

“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

Communication

“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 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

World

“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

Understanding

“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

Mathematics

“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

Way , Question

“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

“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

Way , Speed

“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

Books , Way

“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