Information: The New Language of Science - Hardcover

Críticas

In INFORMATION, physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer sets out to explain why this is regarded as one of the most fundamental and philosophical questions in science: information is the irreducible seed from which every particle, every force and even the fabric of space-time grows. This is deep stuff, but von Baeyer romps through a huge range of subjects...you will never think of information the same way again. (NEW SCIENTIST (November issue))

I was fascinated to learn how topics such as randomness, entropy and logarithms were interwoven. By the end I had a hugely explaned idea of information, the strange compressible stuff that comes out of tangible objects - a DNA molecule, a piano - and then ultimately lodges itself in the brain and into consciousness. (Jerome Burne FINANCIAL TIMES (8.11.03))

...fascinating...Von Baeyer is incapable of penning an ugly sentence. (Graham Farmelo GUARDIAN (15.11.03))

If you're looking for a simplified introduction to some of the most unusual ideas in physics at the moment, this...[is] a good place to start. (Richard Wentik FOCUS (January '04))

The book's most appealing feature is its focus on big questions...There is a nice balance between accepted science and speculative ideas...von Baeyer has provided an accessible and engaging overview of the emerging role of information as a fundamental building block in science. (Michael A. Nielson NATURE (January 2004))

Each chapter is a well-structured and elegantly written essay that circumnavigates its topic with poetic quotation, literary allusion, biographuical anecdote, personal reminiscence, mathematical paradox and metaphysical musing, all expressed in a clear and vivid prose style. (Tony Hoare TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT (2.1.04))

Reseña del editor

Today we live in the information age. Wherever we look it surrounds us, and, with the help of ever more efficient devices from the internet through to mobile phones, we are producing, exchanging and harnessing more than ever before. But information does far more than define our modern age - at a fundamental it defines the material world itself, for it is through its mediating role that we gain all of our knowledge, and everything derives its function, existence and meaning from it.

In twenty-five short chapters, von Baeyer takes us from the birth of the concept of information and its basic language, the bit - which encodes it in zeroes or ones like the heads OR tails result of a coin toss - through to the coal-face of contemporary physics and beyond in quantum mechanics, quantum computing and qubits - the quantum equivalent of the bit, where information is encoded in the form of zeroes AND ones, as if a tossed coin came up heads and tails at once. Along the way, he illuminates such diverse issues as Morse code; gaming theory and probability; genetics and heredity; Einstein and general relativity; black holes; randomness; abstraction; the impossibility of true objectivity and the role of philosophy in modern physics - deftly unpicking the many strands that knit information so tightly into the fabric of the universe, and explaining why it has the power to become the most fundamental concept in physics. This is a snappily written and utterly absorbing work, which, with its deceptively simple presentation, gives an incredible insight into a new language of science and a new way of understanding.