Hans Christian von Baeyer Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

An electron is real; a probability is not.

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

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.

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

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?

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