Quotes About Information

By reframing and redefining what the information space is, we unlock new possibilities

Sometimes, a different way of representing information is the key to understanding something as complicated as the subatomic world.

When we extend information into our immediate surroundings, the space around us becomes a structure for holding information, which, in turn, reduces the individual cost of understanding. By using space in an intelligent way, we extend our cognitive abilities.

Learning and education have frequently degenerated into the systematic accumulation of facts and information.

Now, for my younger viewers out there, a book is something we used to have before the internet. It's sort of a blog for people with attention spans.

In Jefferson's day, it took six weeks to move information from the Mississippi River to Washington, D.C. In Lincoln's, information moved over the same route by telegraph all but instantaneously.

If the government is covering up knowledge of aliens, they are doing a better job of it than they do at anything else.

No matter how powerful a computer you have, if you put lousy data in you will get lousy predictions out.

My investigations revealed a deep and previously unsuspected relationship between gravity and thermodynamics, the science of heat, and resolved a paradox that had been argued over for thirty years without much progress: how could the radiation left over from a shrinking black hole carry all of the information about what made the black hole? I discovered that information is not lost, but it is not returned in a useful way—like burning an encyclopedia but retaining the smoke and ashes.

you remember every word in this book, your memory will have recorded about two million pieces of information: the order in your brain will have increased by about two million units. However, while you have been reading the book, you will have converted at least a thousand calories of ordered energy, in the form of food, into disordered energy, in the form of heat that you lose to the air around you by convection and sweat.

Therefore, a human is equivalent to about fifty Harry Potter books, and a major national library can contain about five million books – or about ten trillion bits.

I think it is legitimate to take a broader view and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race.

By contrast, there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information is garbage and no use to any form of life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA.

At some point during our 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, something beautiful happened. This information processing got so intelligent that life forms became conscious. Our universe has now awoken, becoming aware of itself.

information paradox

This apparent loss of information, known as the information paradox, has troubled scientists for the last forty years, and still remains one of the biggest unsolved problems in theoretical physics.

in the last 10,000 years or so we have been in what might be called an external transmission phase. In this, the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has changed somewhat. But the external record—in books and other long-lasting forms of storage—has grown enormously.

Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding

If information is lost in macroscopic black holes it should also be lost in processes in which microscopic, virtual black holes appear because of quantum fluctuations of the metric. One could imagine that particles and information could fall into these holes and get lost. Maybe that is where all those odd socks went.

Science is no inexorable march to truth, mediated by the collection of objective information and the destruction of ancient superstition. Scientists, as ordinary human beings, unconsciously reflect in their theories the social and political constraints of their times.

science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programed to collect pure information.

We do not usually surrender the intellectual system of a lifetime for one bit of information that does not fit.

There's always someone who knows something.

But this wealth of information produced little or no insight.