Hans Christian von Baeyer Quotes

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

Entropy is not about speeds or positions of particles, the way temperature and pressure and volume are, but about our lack of information.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense.

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

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

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.

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.

This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for.

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.