A Progressive Living Book Review Representative Quotations Mission Statement "This book is an attempt to tell the story of information theory and how it evolved out of the ferment of scientific activity during the Second World War. The results of this wartime research were not simply to redefine a word which had long remained tantalizingly vague. Rather, an entirely new science was born, making it possible to examine intractable problems from a higher vantage point of knowledge. The laws and theorems of this science stimulated exciting ideas in biology and language, probability theory, psychology, philosophy, art, computers, and the study of society. Just as the principles of the new science of energy yielded fresh insights extending far beyond the horizons of engineering, so information theory opened windows onto a domain of knowledge as broad as nature, as complex a man's mind. "Biologists as well as philosophers have suggested that the universe, and the living forms it contains, are based on chance, but not on accident. To put it another way, forces of chance and of antichance coexist in a complementary relationship. The random element is called entropy, the agent of chaos, which tends to mix up the unmixed, to destroy meaning. The nonrandom element is information, which exploits the uncertainty inherent in the entropy principle to generate new structures, to inform the world in novel ways. "Information theory shows that there are good reasons why the forces of antichance are as universal as the forces of chance, even though entropy has been presented as the overwhelmingly more powerful principle. The proper metaphor for the life process may not be a pair of rolling dice or a spinning roulette wheel, but the sentences of a language, conveying information that is partly predictable and partly unpredictable. These sentences are generated by rules which make much out of little, producing a boundless wealth of meaning from a finite store of words; they enable language to be familiar yet surprising, constrained yet unpredictable within its constraints. "Sense and order, the theory says, can prevail against nonsense and chaos. The world need not regress toward the simple, the uniform, and the banal, but may advance in the direction of richer and more complex structures, physical and mental. Life, like language, remains 'grammatical.' The classical view of entropy implied that structure is the exception and confusion the rule. The theory of information suggests instead that order is entirely natural: grammatical man inhabits a grammatical universe." Other Quotations "Evidently nature can no longer be seen as matter and energy alone. Nor can all her secrets be unlocked with the keys of chemistry and physics, brilliantly successful as these two branches of science have been in our century. A third component is needed for any explanation of the world that claims to be complete. To the powerful theories of chemistry and physics must be added a late arrival: a theory of information. Nature must be interpreted as matter, energy, and information." "Scientists are still actively exploring the riddle of why nature's products are so improbable, why they display so much order, when the most probable state for them to be in is one of muddle and error, a surrender to the forces of disorder in the universe that seem so overwhelming and natural. This is still thought of as being one of the disturbing paradoxes in science. It is first cousin to theperennial question of philosophy: 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' In his 1948 papers, Shannon proved that, contrary to what we might expect, 'something,' a message, can persist in the midst of 'nothing,' a haphazard disorder, or noise."
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