Information, the new language of science

As we are always being told, we are constantly bombarded with information. We have Information technology and Information science to try to deal with it. Von Baeyer's book concerns the philosophy of information - it looks at how we are beginning to see the world in terms of it. The preface describes the inspiration from John AWheeler's ideas of 'It from Bit', that is the idea that reality can be thought of as pure information. The book is aimed at the non-technical reader. Some of the concepts may be challenging, but no prior knowledge is required of any of the subjects covered.

Unfortunately the book doesn't start very well. Rather than giving a gentle introduction to the subject, the author seems to be trying to show what a difficult subject this is. Don't worry if you find this a struggle as happily the rest of the book is much better. Part two deals with areas such as Entropy, Relativity and genome sequencing, finishing with Landauer's ideas that 'Information is Physical'. Part three starts by describing some of the ideas of quantum theory, and proceeds on to quantum computers, finishing with an account of black holes.. The last part consists of two chapters, one looking at alternative measures of information, and the last on the Zeilinger's ideas describing quantum theory in terms of information