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Re: information theory?
Posted:
Nov 2, 2011 6:06 PM
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BJACOBY@teranews.com wrote:
> On 11/1/2011 12:29 PM, RichD wrote:
>
>> I read Shannon's paper long go, and found it fascinating
>> ever since. In the most general sense, it's applicable
>> to so many areas. For instance, people have recast
>> thermodynamics as information processing. Or, you
>> could model the entire universe as a computer, and
>> information theory applies. It even describes human
>> nature - manipulating symbols is what separates us
>> from the apes.
>
> Actually, Shannon's "paper" is a book. And the unfortunate part is that
> physicists in particular for the most part have developed little
> understanding of Shannon's association of information with entropy. This
> one fact alone blows a huge hole in classical physics. Yet, (nearly) all
> physicists go blindly on barfing the sad dogma of how entropy always
> increases, how the universe is "running down" etc. etc. They know even
> less about the relationships between signal processing and
> Electromagnetic theory. They can't understand the transform
> relationships between the amplitude of a wave in free space at one point
> and it's far field angular expansion. They are snowed by self-inductance
> because they haven't bothered to understand the nature of feedback
> systems. In short they are stuck in ignorance and the past and have NO
> desire to move out of it.
>
> But the unfortunate facts are that information theory especially
> combined with things like classical thermodynamics holds the key to
> physics in the 21st century! And what exactly IS physics going to be in
> the 21st century? I can tell you. It will be the physics of the things
> that physics of today has so LOUDLY avoided. Namely, the physics of
> life! The grass under my brick sidewalk is ALWAYS striving to take the
> chaos of the dirt down there and turn it into ORDER! It insists on doing
> this every year in spite of my best efforts to stop it! But still
> "traditional" science pretends to move "forward" while ignoring the fact
> that Shannon shot all their dogma to hell back in the MIDDLE of the the
> 20th century.
>
Eh? Physics guys loudly accept that entropy can go up locally. They
just say universal ( meaning at the scale of the universe ) entropy
is what goes up. Sagan at one point assigned values to the relative
entropy/order increases from reading something, for example.
Penrose/Hawking and everybody else since have used
communications theory quite a bit to do physics. I
don't even think it's settled yet.
Penroses' "Emperor's New Mind" misses quite a bit ( he
skyhooks some stuff ) but that alone should show they're
thinking about it.
If physics has a problem, it is that the experiments have all gotten
too expensive for a 1920s-1950s level of progress to occur. That, and
string theory becoming too precious and abstract.
--
Les Cargill
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