Hans Christian von Baeyer Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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