Thank you, Marcin, for your caution against trying to find THE definition of
information! I tend to think in analogies, and since I'm a physicist, they
often come from physics. In this case I have already introduced the analogy
to energy, and I'd like to take it a step further.
Everyone knows what energy is, but nobody knows what energy REALLY IS.
There is no simple definition in any textbook! Instead, there are two
things:
1) There are dozens of specific and well-understood formulas for energy in
different circumstances (eg kinetic energy, potential gravitational energy,
rest mass energy, chemical energy etc) Similarly, there could be many
specific measures or even definitions of information in different
circumstances.
2) There is a law of conservation of energy, which every one of the formulas
mentioned above fits into. In the case of information, there seems to be a
hint of some kind of second law (eg Kahre's law of diminishing information,
the second law of thermodynamics... ) but nothing that I know of that's
crisp and universal. So besides looking for definitions of information, we
ought to be looking also for laws that this information obeys, and that can
be usefully employed to make predictions or at least to clrify processes.
None of this implies that we should stop looking for a general, overarching,
univerally acceptable definition of what kind of a commodity, substance,
idea, notion, construct, or concept this INFORMATION is.
Hans Christian von Baeyer
Chancellor Professor of Physics
College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, VA
23187 USA
Tel. (757) 221 3529
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Received on Wed Sep 14 15:25:03 2005
