Julian Barbour Quotes

and variety are central to my critique of 'it from bit'. For we can only talk meaningfully about a thing, including a '', if it has distinguishing attributes. The way that they are knit together, as in the taste, shape and colour of an apple, defines the structure of the thing.

The concepts of message and probability enable one, for a definite source of <math>N</math> messages, to define Shannon’s information. If <math>p_i,\quad i = 1, 2, ..., N</math>, is the relative probability of message <math>i</math> and <math>\log p_i</math> is its base-2 logarithm, then the information <math>I</math> of the given source is(1) <math>\quad I = - \sum_{k=1}^N p_i \log p_i</math>.The minus sign makes <math>I</math> positive because all probabilities, which are necessarily greater than or equal zero, are less than unity (their sum being<math>\textstyle \sum_{i}^N p_i = 1</math>, so that their logarithms are all negative.

There is one metalaw of science: it cannot exist without structured things. d variety is the ground of being. That is what gives content to both science and life.

Thus, even now, three and a half centuries after Galileo... it is still remarkably difficult to say categorically whether the earth moves...

Shannon information... [which] he also called entropy or ... involves things (...Shannon ...messages) and probabilities for those things.

Einstein... revealed... extraordinary things... [H]is space and time seem to be knit together in a way you can't pull them apart... [S]omeone moving relative to me at any speed would... divide space and time in different ways... [T]he huge excitement about simultaneity meant that the... issue of duration has... been forgotten...

[T]hings, not information, are primary. ... 'bit' derives from 'it'.

Wheeler argued that anything physical... derives its... existence... from discrete detector-elicited information-theoretic answers to yes or no quantum binary choices: bits.

[T]he work that I did with... has shown... time that is measured by clocks is... an average of all the changes in the universe.

Poincaré clearly posed these two problems and... seven years later... independently... Einstein and Poincaré... solved... the problem of defining definition at spatially separated points...

[T]his is very different from the Newtonian picture where Newton presupposes there's a river of time flowing, that is there before anything is put into it. ...[T]he things are there first, and the time is deduced from it afterwards.

Greek astronomers observed intricate motions of the sun, moon, and planets on the two-dimensional sky. They explained them—saved the appearances—by positing simple regular motions... in three dimensions. The success... [was] brought to a triumphant conclusion by Kepler...

[S]ymbols have no meaning if divorced from the entities that they represent.

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[T]ime is really an illusion... and motion too... [T]hey are not really there in the external world. They are put into the world by us, in the way we interpret it, and by our brains...