Quotes About Information

DNA was the chemical material on which hereditary information was recorded, while a gene was one unit of that nearly infinite amount of hereditary information.

Cellular automatons provide an elegant solution when each cell contains a complete calculating system, as symbolically represented in Fig. 73. These single calculating systems contain both information-processing and information-storing elements.

In fiction, the language and the senses it evokes are important, whereas in technical writing, the content, and the information it conveys, are important.

The library. Books held the answer to every question.

casualty reports on either side are never accurate, seldom truthful, and in most cases deliberately falsified.

Probability does not refer to the system as such (the dice, the newspaper editor, the decaying atom, tomorrow's weather), but to the knowledge that I have about this system.

Time is information we don't have. Time is our ignorance.

The entropy of a system depends explicitly on blurring. It depends on what I do not register, because it depends on the number of indistinguishable configurations. The same microscopic configuration may be of high entropy with regard to one blurring and of low in relation to another.

Quanta of space mingle with the foam of spacetime, and the structure of things is born from reciprocal information that weaves the correlations among the regions of the world.

All of this, I believe, indicates that in order to grasp the basic grammar of the world, we need to merge three basic ingredients, not just two: not just general relativity and quantum mechanics, but also the theory of heat, that is, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, which we can also describe as "information theory.

Any description of a system is therefore always a description of the information a system has about another system, that is to say, the correlation between the two systems.

The primal substance of our thoughts is an extremely rich gathering of information that's accumulated, exchanged, and continually elaborated. Even

Special relativity may be summarized as the discovery that there exists a maximum velocity for all physical systems. Quantum mechanics can be summarized as the discovery that there exists a maximum of information for each physical system.

due to which the value of one variable implies something about the value of the other.68 This is the meaning of the word "information" that I am using here.

This clarified, here is the point: it is possible to think of quantum physics as a theory of information (in the sense outlined) that systems have about one another.

information is the measure of the number of possible alternatives for something. For example, if I throw a die, it can land on one of six faces.

Therefore, the first meaning of quantum mechanics is the existence of a limit to the information that can exist within a system: a limit to the number of distinguishable states in which a system can be. This limitation upon infinity, this granularity of nature glimpsed by Democritus, is the first central aspect of the theory. Planck's constant h measures the elementary scale of this granularity.

Remember that a key result of quantum mechanics is precisely the fact that information is finite. The number of alternative results that we can obtain measuring a physical system* is infinite in classical mechanics; but thanks to quantum theory, we have understood that, in reality, it is finite. Quantum mechanics can be understood as the discovery that information in nature is always finite.

Any description of a system is therefore always a description of the information a system has about another system, that is to say, the correlation between the two systems. The

The entire formal structure of quantum mechanics can be in large measure expressed in two simple postulates:1 The relevant information in any physical system is finite. You can always obtain new information on a physical system.

Carlo Rovelli

Time is an effect of our overlooking the physical microstates of things. Time is information we don't have. Time is our ignorance.

Why does information play such a central role as this? Perhaps because we must not confuse what we know about a system with the absolute state of the same system. What we know is something concerning the relation between the system and ourselves. Knowledge is intrinsically relational; it depends just as much on its object as upon its subject.

But the effective way of continuing to exist in a changing environment is to better manage correlations with the external world, that is to say, information: to collect, store, transmit, and elaborate information. For this reason DNA exists, together wih immune systems, sense organs, nervous systems, comolex brains, languages, books, the library of Alexandria, computers and Wikipedia: they maximize the efficiency of information management. The management of correlations favoring survival.