Hans Christian von Baeyer Quotes

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 smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information.

In order to understand information, we must define it; bit in order to define it, we must first understand it. Where to start?

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

Nowhere is the difference between either/or and both/and more clearly apparent than in the context of information.

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.

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

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.

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

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