Information and Physics

Dear Jerry and all:

>A colleague defined physics to me as the art of finding the simple in
>the complex.

   I heard the same story from many physicists I know. But recently,
there gradually appear on the scene those physicsts saying that
there exists the tough complex that is complex at its real value,
instead of being merely nominal.

>The sentence

>> "Information has its own business, and physics has its own, too."

>deserves careful inspection from a philosophical perspective. Are the
>terms "information" and "physics" more than semantic sub-classes of our
>historical efforts to communicate with one another?

   You push me into a corner. I admit that I have started from the
sense of using the terms in ordinary languages. That is to employ
an object-oriented language. Ordinary languages ask us to live with
the liar's paradox. In contrast, formal languages having their definite
closures referring to their structures remind us of the incompleteness
theorem. Either one has its own problem. But, there seems to be no
other alternatives. Some physicists may look to seek a tradeoff
between the two modes of language rather seriously if I am not
overly wrong.

   Regards,
   Koichiro

     Koichiro Matsuno

  
Received on Tue Jan 13 06:19:14 1998