Information

The New Language of Science

Hans Christian von Baeyer

  • 2005 Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title

Prologue: Really Big Questions

Background

1. Electric Rain: Information in Our Lives

2. The Spell of Democritus: Why Information Will Transform Physics

3. In-Formation: The Roots of the Concept

4. Counting Bits: The Scientific Measure of Information

5. Abstraction: Beyond Concrete Reality

6. The Book of Life: Genetic Information

7. A Battle among Giants: Reductionism and Emergence

8. The Oracle of Copenhagen: Science Is about Information

Classical Information

9. Figuring the Odds: How Probability Measures Information

10. Counting Digits: The Ubiquitous Logarithm

11. The Message on the Tombstone: The Meaning of Entropy

12. Randomness: The Flip Side of Information

13. Electric Information: From Morse to Shannon

14. Noise: Nuisance and Necessity

15. Ultimate Speed: The Information Speed Limit

16. Unpacking Information: The Computer in the Service of Physics

17. Bioinformatics: Biology Meets Information Technology

18. Information Is Physical: The Cost of Forgetting

Quantum Information

19. The Quantum Gadget: Quantum Weirdness Brought to Light

20. A Game of Beads: The Wonder of Superposition

21. The Qubit: Information in the Quantum Age

22. Quantum Computing: Putting Qubits to Work

23. Black Holes: Where Information Goes to Hide

Work in Progress

24. Bits, Bucks, Hits and Nuts: Information beyond Shannon

25. Zeilinger's Principle: Information at the Root of Reality

Notes

Index

  • Cover: Information

Hans Christian von Baeyer is Chancellor Professor of Physics at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. In the course of his career he has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, served as Director of the Virginia Associated Research Campus--an interdisciplinary research laboratory which became the nucleus of the Jefferson Lab (the world's premier electron accelerator facility for nuclear physics)--and garnered numerous awards for his scientific writing. His previous books include Taming the Atom, Rainbows, Snowflakes and Quarks, and Warmth Disperses and Time Passes.