Information Physics: The New Frontier | Hacker News Reader

Information Physics: The New Frontier

arxiv.org

59 pointsheydenberk12 comments

This is really nice: "The implication is that physical law does not reflect the order in the universe, instead it is derived from the order imposed by our description of the universe."

btw to download this: curl http://arxiv.org/pdf/1009.5161v1 > infophysics.pdf

I always thought that was what all Physical models were, a best approximation, given the empirical data available at the time.

I'm surprised that something titled "Information Physics" was not submitted to quant-ph, which is where all of the quantum information papers go.

The arXiv is strongly based on the category a paper is placed in. (Tons of controversy when submissions are recategorized.)

A long time ago (1990) Tom Stonier wrote an expansive and thought-provoking book on Information Physics (http://www.amazon.com/Information-Internal-Structure-Univers...)

I'd never seen anything quite like it at the time. So while it's certainly a 'new approach' to science, it's not exactly 'new'. It's not fair to be dead and forgotten...

That sent me to the link to look and I was slapped down by the price. It says it was to be part of a trilogy. I see other books by him too, but did they conclude the trilogy or did he die before finishing?

Fred Kantor wrote a book called "Information Mechanics" in 1976, which treats the same topic.

It's definitely not strictly "new", but I read a sense of a broader historical narrative in which the current time will at some point be considered the infancy of information physics.

Hmm. Sounds a bit frothy, but since I'm reading James Gleick's _The Information_ ... I'll take a look.

Are you enjoying Gleick? I've been considering it, but other books keep jumping the queue.

I'm enjoying it a lot. Sometimes I think he spends too much time on historical context rather than information theoretic concepts...but that's a subjective preference of course.

Yes. I get wrapped up in it for a bit, then put it down to read other books.

I like the historical context, but at times I get impatient to jump ahead because it feels like I'm on the verge of understanding something significant.

One benefit of the historical sections is that I now want to go back and read some of the original sources. Esp. Shannon and Turing.

I recently read Gleick's _The Information_. It's a quick, interesting read, although I suspect people who don't share my combination of interest in the OED and Babbage's difference engine may find one of those sections to drag. Like a lot of good science writing, it strives to make scientific and technical concepts palatable through the conceit of a historical narrative, and it's largely successful. As a hacker and a geek, I naturally wish it were more technical and less biography.

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