Hans Christian Von Baeyer Quotes

In fact, an information theory that leaves out the issue of noise turns out to have no content.

Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense.

Both induction and deduction, reasoning from the particular and the general, and back again from the universal to the specific, form the essence to scientific thinking.

This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for.

The law of conservation of energy, reborn as the law of conservation of mass/energy, has established itself as one of the few unshakable theoretical guideposts in the wilderness of the world of our sense experiences. In scope and generality it surpasses Newton's laws of motion, Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism, and even Einstein's potent little E=mc². It comes as close to an absolute truth as our uncertain age will permit.

Entropy is not about speeds or positions of particles, the way temperature and pressure and volume are, but about our lack of information.

For generations, field guides to plants and animals have sharpened the pleasure of seeing by opening our minds to understanding. Now John Adam has filled a gap in that venerable genre with his painstaking but simple mathematical descriptions of familiar, mundane physical phenomena. This is nothing less than a mathematical field guide to inanimate nature.

Numbers instill a feeling for the lie of the land, and furnish grist for the mathematical mill that is the physicist's principal tool.

Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain.

The smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information.

An electron is real; a probability is not.

Time has been called God's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once. In the same spirit, noise is Nature's way of making sure that we don't find out everything that happens. Noise, in short, is the protector of information.

The solution of the Monty Hall problem hinges on the concept of information, and more specifically, on the relationship between added information and probability.

The switch from 'steam engines' to 'heat engines' signals the transition from engineering practice to theoretical science.