Information, Entropy, Life And The Universe: What We Know And What We Do Not Know

by Arieh Ben-Naim

"This is indeed a welcome and long needed addition to the literature dealing with the connection between entropy and information theory. BenNaim's book serves as a cautionary statement on a bottle of medicine warning the avid reader not to swallow all that is fed him in the pseudoscientific popular literature that has grown up around the words entropy and information." Professor Lavenda Bernard University of Camerino "This is a commendable book. The book is explicitly meant for a general quite good jokes are cracked, the language is userfriendly, technical words are avoided when unnecessary or explained when unavoidable, mathematics is kept to a (nontrivial) minimum, logarithms, basic probability, basic calculus." zbMath "With all its profoundness the book is very understandable and easy to read and should be accessible to a wide audience with a general scientific background. Overall, the book provides a pleasantly dry look at a subject matter that frequently plays a role in popular science literature when it comes to explaining the really big picture." Angewandte Chemie The aim of this book is to explain in simple language what we know and what we do not know about information and entropy - two of the most frequently discussed topics in recent literature - and whether they are relevant to life and the entire universe. Entropy is commonly interpreted as a measure of disorder. This interpretation has caused a great amount of "disorder" in the literature. One of the aims of this book is to put some "order" in this "disorder". The book explains with minimum amount of mathematics what information theory is and how it is related to thermodynamic entropy. Then it critically examines the application of these concepts to the question of "What is life?" and whether or not they can be applied to the entire universe.

Genres: Science, Physics

492 pages, Paperback

First published May 18, 2015

Reviews

[Simona B]

Almost all the mathematics went right over my head, but in my layman's opinion Ben-Naim does a wonderful job of shedding light on slippery and not-so-immediate concepts which, in less capable hands, would simply be the objects of mystifying if inspirational and high-sounding catchphrases--the latter being a tendency common to many science-popularisers that is often the target of Ben-Naim's ire. Personally, I think that a healthy dose of sarcastic scepticism never hurts, so my reading experience was made twice as enjoyable by Ben-Naim's genuine desire to abide by the actual scientific facts at our disposal in the conviction that this is how you truly get to understand the difficult ideas this book deals with. Wholly recommended on my part.

[Wouter Van · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mathematical deduction of ideal gas law from information entropy is quite interesting.
Rest of the book did not interest me.