Science of Information
Duration: 4 hours
Target Audience: Anyone who is interested in science, life, joy, nature and the cosmos
Brief:
We record and process enormous quantity information that strikes our five senses. The human brain processes about 100 GB per second in order to survive and be happy. The appetite for information has been integral to the human condition as the hunger for food and love. An average child reads about 50-feet stack of books in its lifetime, in order to learn and to survive. Though we are not aware, we are drenched in an electric rain (cell phone signals, radio waves… and so on) of information. They go through our walls (in our homes and offices) and bodies and vehicles. They penetrate everything that is visible to our eyes. Our computers process information following the “dualistic principle of Nature” in 0’s and 1’s. We create, store, process, discard lots of information. Not only humans, but all living things extract and process wealth of information in their life-times. Birds sing, honeybees dance, lions roar, hyenas laugh, ants and moths sprinkle chemicals—all sending out information into their surroundings. Information is everywhere in Nature in myriad forms, if only we can observe.
Though it looks like we understood what information is, science has not been able to define it pin-pointedly, like it did for ‘inertia’ or ‘force’ or ‘Avogadro’s number’. The word ‘information’ is more complex than it appears to be. In this lecture, the concept of information will be explored from several angles: Mathematical, Statistical, Semantic, Thermodynamic, Genetic, Physical, Computer science, Economic, Quantum and Cosmological. Probably, the solid material world we see and feel does not really exist, but only as its information, in Nature’s perspective. That’s why ‘information’, from physics-viewpoint, is the essence of Nature.
Though it looks like we understood what information is, science has not been able to define it pin-pointedly, like it did for ‘inertia’ or ‘force’ or ‘Avogadro’s number’. The word ‘information’ is more complex than it appears to be. In this lecture, the concept of information will be explored from several angles: Mathematical, Statistical, Semantic, Thermodynamic, Genetic, Physical, Computer science, Economic, Quantum and Cosmological. Probably, the solid material world we see and feel does not really exist, but only as its information, in Nature’s perspective. That’s why ‘information’, from physics-viewpoint, is the essence of Nature.