Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes

by Charles Seife

Book Overview

The author of Zero explains the scientific revolution that is transforming the way we understand our world Previously the domain of philosophers and linguists, information theory has now moved beyond... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143038397
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.6" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

Information theory, the third physics revolution of the XXth century

The author has a degree in probability theory and artificial intelligence, but he is a professor of journalism and has therefore written a book which is both very entertaining and not too difficult to understand. The subject is information, which Seife claims is the third XXth century revolution in physics started by Claude Shannon and which has relations with the other two: Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Of course, information is also related to thermodynamics and entropy, so the book contains a discussion of all these topics: thermodynamics, relativity and quantum mechanics. Famous conundrums such as Schroedinger's cat, entanglement, Maxwell's demon, etc. are analyzed from the point of view of information theory. Here are some snippets of the book: According to Seife, Einstein dictum "Nothing can travel faster than light" is really about information:" Information speed cannot exceed c". Another interesting fact is that what really causes computers to heat is the erasure of bits. Seife describes recent achievements and experiments, proof that he is familiar with the latest results. One curious example is the solution of "the knight problem" in 2000 by using a DNA computer! Another one is that the entire human race has less genetic diversity than a few scores of chimps due to some kind of cataclysm about 500,000 years ago. A third one is the 1996 experiment demonstrating the existence of virtual particles (the so called Casimir effect). In chapter 7, quantum computers are introduced and the possibility of the brain being one is briefly discussed. Unfortunately, it seems that Max Tegmark proved Roger Penrose wrong on this count. You begin to understand the power of quantum computation when the author describes Grover's algorithm to guess a number out of 16. Classically you need four yes/no answers to four questions. Grover manages the same task with two. Quantum computation reduces the complexity of some problems from n to square root of n. I found also very interesting the reasons why the photoelectric effect cannot be explained by waves. On the other hand, interference cannot be explained by a corpuscular theory of light, so we are stuck with duality. Towards the end, the author discusses black holes and the holographic principle: the quantity of information contained in a ball is not limited by its volume (surprisingly), but by its area. Since most cosmologists consider now the universe infinite (inflation seems to imply this) we are led, via the holographic bound, to the conclusion that the universe contains infinite copies of our own bubble universe. Seife admits that this is the most bizarre thing among the many ones described in his book.

Very Well Rounded

I have a Ph.D. in Physics and therefore know many well educated scientists, but very few have a functional concept of Information as a physical science. Begun with, mostly, Claude Shannon, this topic of study has been growing into a real science for decades now, but for some reason it is one of the most misunderstood subjects out there, even for seasoned professional scientists. Seife cuts to the heart of the matter with very clear thinking and examples from a very well rounded range of scientific points of view. Seife clearly and very engagingly demystifies many confusing topics and brings a real and almost visceral familiarity to a complex subject. After reading this, you will understand many esoteric scientific concepts better than even some professionals... and enjoy it immensely!

Information and Understanding the Universe

Information is the key to the mysteries of the universe, according to Charles Seife, author of Zero and now of Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes (Penguin Books, 2006, ii + 296 pp.). This information is not like the letters on a page (which encode information that allows us to read words), though it includes that. It also includes any kind of charge or registered change of state, such as a 0 or 1 in computer talk. In fact, anything that can be represented by 0's and 1's is information, and all information can be so registered. In explaining how information theory has transformed thinking in the sciences, Seife covers a lot of ground--cosmology, quantum theory, biology, etc., etc. Seife does a fine job of explaining some key concepts in information theory, such as redundancy--the use of clues to indicate what some piece of information actually is. One such is the use of vowels even when not needed for capturing the words. Th ct n th ht, probably does not need the vowels to be understood. `Ingenius' and `ingenuous' would, however. One thing I did not know, meaning I was utterly clueless about, is that computers, which use compressed files that eliminate all sorts of redundancy, do make errors, though we virtually never see them because there are built-in checks and balances that catch and correct them. Since a computer operates entirely on 0's and 1's, or, more literally, on charges and lack of charges, all information that we normally think of as information can be recorded in this way. What Seife wishes to show is that information theory underlies physics and other sciences and that understanding that much helps to deal with a variety of problems, from probabilities to the famous Schrödinger's cat to black holes and what happens around them. He also discusses some problems that have yet to be resolved. Without attempting to explain his explanations, which make sense upon reading but can be difficult to keep clearly in mind, he uses as examples DNA sequences, mathematical formulas for the expansion of gases (which exactly parallel equations for the transmission of information!), and probabilities associated with questions like the state of Schrödinger's cat before anyone looks. He illuminates the issue of light functioning as a wave and as particles through information theory, showing that, while light might be considered neither or both, thought of as information resolves the paradoxes associated with it. The book, as he warns, has a dreary side, since information is closely tied to entropy, the diffusion of energy until it is evenly distributed throughout the universe. Information theory itself suggests that we are doomed to a future (incomprehensibly long in the future) when all information disappears, that is, entropy is total. For information requires differences in energy levels--a distinction between 0 and 1, so to speak--to exist,

Seife Strikes Again

Charles Seife's books do more than just aim for that, "goshwow" many popular science books do. Decoding The Universe /has/ that but Seife will be able to suprise even those of us that go directly to the Science area of the bookstore. Decoding The Universe puts the idea of Information Science into context with the rest of physics, from Einstiens cosmology to the quantum world. Its done with a fun, light style that belies the depth of the subject, often explaining things like Schrodinger's Cat or the speed of light better than many books or television shows that assume a general ignorance in the reader. Seife doesn't bury you under numbers but he doesn't make you flip forward either as you bypass some simplistic explaination. Good stuff for those inclined towards science!

If there ever was a Mother-of-All Theories....

In reviews thus far of "Decoding the Universe," both formal and informal, there is a pattern of confusion and disorientation about the book's real topic. Take Laura Miller's review on Salon.com for example. Though it is largely a positive review, she introduces the book as a book on cosmology and compares it, as a few other reviewers have, to Seth Lloyd's book on quantum computing, "Programming the Universe." Yes it is true, Charles Seife does write about the universe and he does have a chapter on quantum computing, but there is more to the book than multiverses and quantum computing. In fact, the very reason for this general sense of disorientation may be the real central concept of the book - Information. For most of us, information is, dates, faces, or names of places. It is an abstract concept. Contrast that to the concept of "Information" Seife introduces, a concept that is physical, a concept that is probabilistic and one that governs the behaviors of atoms, black holes and all living beings. The word "Universe" in the title may have been a bit misleading, conjuring a, somewhere `out there' in a subatomic realm, far far away, image. The universe in Seife's title is not just about the universe out there in the dark sky, it really alludes to a `Universal Law' that applies to all things in our universe. Seife's book is really about an emerging law, that may well become, once all the debates come to an end, the most fundamental law of the universe. "Information can neither be created nor destroyed." The book begins with three important figures, Alan Turing the English mathematician who is considered as the father of computer science, Ludwig Boltzmann, who formalized the statistical concept of thermodynamic entropy and engineer Claude Shannon, whose Information theory is the reason we have such mainstays today as the internet and cell phones. In the first three chapters Seife introduces the works of these three men and the happenstance way in which, the exorcism of a demon (Maxwell's theoretical demon) establishes a fundamental connection between Boltzmann's entropy and Shannon's information. As a result, thermodynamics, the field in physics that describes the behaviors of mass and energy became "a special case of information theory," and along with it, information itself became, according to Seife, a quantifiable and concrete property of mass and energy. As Seife goes on to tell us, the laws of thermodynamics are not the only ones to be subsumed by the concept of information. Even Einstein's theory of relativity, Seife insists, is really, "a theory about information." Specifically, the theory dictates the maximum speed at which information can be transferred in the universe: speed of light. He doesn't stop there; he takes us to the subatomic realms where he introduces the information character of quantum behavior. "In fact," he says, "all the absurdity of quantum theory - all the seemingly impossible behaviors of atoms, electrons