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Title: Information : The New Language of Science by Hans Christian Von Baeyer, Hans Christian Von Baeyer ISBN: 0-674-01387-5 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: 16 April, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: An informative book on information, beautifully written....
Comment: What a delightful surprise to stumble across this book on Amazon a few months ago, before it had even been released. Since I was familiar with and greatly admired von Baeyer's book on Maxwell's Demon, ``Warmth Disperses and Time Passes'', I immediately pre-ordered a copy of ``Information--The New Language of Science''.
How pleasant to find it dropped on my doorstep a week ago (3/16/04).
The book is published by Harvard University Press, so physically it is very high quality. Von Baeyer is an excellent expositor, and has written several books on science for the lay person.
Check out his other books by all means.
Information, as a physical quantity, has been rapidly evolving. It is destined to play a pivotal role in this century, especially in physics. We now distinguish between classical and quantum information, and it is safe to say that there are many mysteries still unsolved about how information is to be understood and what role it plays in the universe.
Von Baeyer's book begins with eight chapters on background information (pardon the pun!) --- how our ideas of information have evolved, the idea of the bit, Shannon's information theory, the role of genetic information in biology, the tension between the ideas of reductionism and emergence in the sciences, and a hint at how the ideas of Bohr, Wheeler, and Zeilinger suggest that, ``Science is about information.''
The next ten chapters flesh out our understanding of classical information. The connection between probability and classical information is explored, as is Boltzmann's discovery of the microscopic interpretation of entropy, noise, Shannon's model of communication theory, bioinformatics, and the discoveries of Landauer and Bennett about the destruction of information and the reversibility of computation.
Then follow four chapters on quantum information. Here we close in the frontier of our understanding. There is a discussion of some of the `weird' things that happen in the quantum mechanical model of the world, and the qubit, the quantum bit, a rich, complex object offering, perhaps, incredible opportunities for quantum information processing. There is a discussion of quantum computing, and finally, black holes. There are deep, deep mysteries lurking here. For example, information is conserved in a natural process described by quantum mechanics. Yet in Stephen Hawking's Black Hole Information Paradox, information disappears into black holes! Black holes involve general relativity, so the marriage between general relativity and quantum mechanics seems destined to involve an understanding of what seems to be a universal currency, information.
For me the last two chapters in the book, on `Work in Progress' were the most inspiring. Here we have a discussion of the frontier, of information theory beyond Shannon, of new entities called bucks, hits, and nuts. The last chapter discusses Zeilinger's brave attempt (1999) at a `foundational principle for quantum mechanics' --- `an elementary system carries one bit of information.' This work is only a few years old, and leaves the breathless reader wanting......MORE INFORMATION !
This is an exciting book, worth 5 stars in my opinion. It is well written, timely, and thought provoking. I wish it had more figures, and even some photographs to make it more visually appealing, but no matter, it is mentally stimulating, and leaves the curious reader wondering. One can't ask for more than that.
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Title: The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene ISBN: 0375412883 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 10 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $28.95 |
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Title: Warmth Disperses and Time Passes : The History of Heat by HANS CHRISTIAN VON BAEYER ISBN: 0375753729 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 15 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Taming the Atom by Hans Christian von Baeyer ISBN: 0486414477 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 16 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought by Gary F. Marcus ISBN: 0465044050 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 16 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: The Man Who Changed Everything : The Life of James Clerk Maxwell by Basil Mahon ISBN: 047086088X Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 03 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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