Top 15 Hans Christian von Baeyer Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

An electron is real; a probability is not.

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.

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

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.

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

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.