We live in the information era. Read more about this age here. Everything in your sorrounding and environtment is bound and related to some kind of “information processing”. Information can also be recorded and transmitted. Therefore, being rude, information is something which is processed, stored and transmitted. Your computer is now processing information, while you read these words. You also record and save your favourite pages and files in your computer. There are many tools to store digital information: HDs, CDs, DVDs, USBs,…And you can transmit that information to your buddies by e-mail, old fashioned postcards and letters, MSN, phone,…You are even processing information with your brain and senses, whenever you are reading this text. Thus, the information idea is abstract and very general. The following diagram shows you how large and multidisciplinary information theory(IT) is:
I enjoyed as a teenager that old game in which you are told a message in your ear, and you transmit it to other human, this one to another and so on. Today, you can see it at big scale on Twitter. Hey! The message is generally very different to the original one! This simple example explains the other side of communication or information transmission: “noise”. Although efficiency is also used. The storage or transmission of information is generally not completely efficient. You can loose information. Roughly speaking, every amount of information has some quantity of noise that depends upon how you transmit the information(you can include a noiseless transmission as a subtype of information process in which, there is no lost information). Indeed, this is also why we age. Our DNA, which is continuously replicating itself thanks to the metabolism (possible ultimately thanksto the solar light), gets progressively corrupted by free radicals and different “chemicals” that makes our cellular replication more and more inefficient. Don’t you remember it to something you do know from High-School? Yes! I am thinking about Thermodynamics. Indeed, the reason because Thermodynamics was a main topic during the 19th century till now, is simple: quantity of energy is constant but its quality is not. Then, we must be careful to build machines/engines that be energy-efficient for the available energy sources.
Before going into further details, you are likely wondering about what information is! It is a set of symbols, signs or objects with some well defined order. That is what information is. For instance, the word ORDER is giving you information. A random permutation of those letters, like ORRDE or OERRD is generally meaningless. I said information was “something” but I didn’t go any further! Well, here is where Mathematics and Physics appear. Don’t run far away! The beauty of Physics and Maths, or as I like to call them, Physmatics, is that concepts, intuitions and definitions, rigorously made, are well enough to satisfy your general requirements. Something IS a general object, or a set of objects with certain order. It can be certain DNA sequence coding how to produce certain substance (e.g.: a protein) our body needs. It can a simple or complex message hidden in a highly advanced cryptographic code. It is whatever you are recording on your DVD ( a new OS, a movie, your favourite music,…) or any other storage device. It can also be what your brain is learning how to do. That is “something”, or really whatever. You can say it is something obscure and weird definition. Really it is! It can also be what electromagnetic waves transmit. Is it magic? Maybe! It has always seems magic to me how you can browse the internet thanks to your Wi-Fi network! Of course, it is not magic. It is Science. Digital or analogic information can be seen as large ordered strings of 1’s and 0’s, making “bits” of information. We will not discuss about bits in this log. Future logs will…
Now, we have to introduce the concepts through some general ideas we have mention and we know from High-School. Firstly, Thermodynamics. As everybody knows, and you have experiences about it, energy can not completely turned into useful “work”. There is a quality in energy. Heat is the most degradated form of energy. When you turn on your car and you burn fuel, you know that some of the energy is transformed into mechanical energy and a lof of energy is dissipated into heat to the atmosphere. I will not talk about the details about the different cycles engines can realize, but you can learn more about them in the references below. Simbollically, we can state that
The great thing is that an analogue relation in information theory does exist! The relation is:
Therefore, there is some subtle analogy and likely some deeper idea with all this stuff. How do physicists play to this game? It is easy. They invent a “thermodynamic potential”! A thermodynamic potential is a gadget (mathematically a function) that relates a set of different thermodynamic variables. For all practical purposes, we will focus here with the so-called Gibbs “free-energy”. It allows to measure how useful a “chemical reaction” or “process” is. Moreover, it also gives a criterion of spontaneity for processes with constant pressure and temperature. But it is not important for the present discussion. Let’s define Gibbs free energy G as follows:
where H is called enthalpy, T is the temperature and S is the entropy. You can identify these terms with the previous concepts. Can you see the similarity with the written letters in terms of energy and communication concepts? Information is something like “free energy” (do you like freedom?Sure! You will love free energy!). Thus, noise is related to entropy and temperature, to randomness, i.e., something that does not store “useful information”.
Internet is also a source of information and noise. There are lots of good readings but there are also spam. Spam is not really useful for you, isn’t it? Recalling our thermodynamic analogy, since the first law of thermodynamics says that the “quantity of energy” is constant and the second law says something like “the quality of energy, in general, decreases“, we have to be aware of information/energy processing. You find that there are signals and noise out there. This is also important, for instance, in High Energy Physics or particle Physics. You have to distinguish in a collision process what events are a “signal” from a generally big “background”.
We will learn more about information(or entropy) and noise in my next log entries. Hopefully, my blog and microblog will become signals and not noise in the whole web.
Where could you get more information? 😀 You have some good ideas and suggestions in the following references:
1) I found many years ago the analogy between Thermodynamics-Information in this cool book (easy to read for even for non-experts)
Applied Chaos Theory: A paradigm for complexity. Ali Bulent Cambel (Author)Publisher: Academic Press; 1st edition (November 19, 1992)
Unfortunately, in those times, as an undergraduate student, my teachers were not very interested in this subject. What a pity!
2) There are some good books on Thermodynamics, I love (and fortunately own) these jewels:
Concepts in Thermal Physics, by Stephen Blundell, OUP. 2009.
A really self-contained book on Thermodynamics, Statistical Physics and topics not included in standard books. I really like it very much. It includes some issues related to the global warming and interesting Mathematics. I enjoy how it introduces polylogarithms in order to handle closed formulae for the Quantum Statistics.
Thermodynamcis and Statistical Mechanics. (Dover Books on Physics & Chemistry). Peter T. Landsberg
A really old-fashioned and weird book. But it has some insights to make you think about the foundations of Thermodynamics.
Thermodynamcis, Dover Pub. Enrico Fermi
This really tiny book is delicious. I learned a lot of fun stuff from it. Basic, concise and completely original, as Fermi himself. Are you afraid of him? Me too! E. Fermi was a really exceptional physicist and lecturer. Don’t loose the opportunity to read his lectures on Thermodynamcis.
Mere Thermodynamics. Don S. Lemons. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Other great little book if you really need a crash course on Thermodynamics.
Introduction to Modern Statistical Physics: A Set of Lectures. Zaitsev, R.O. URSS publishings.
I have read and learned some extra stuff from URSS ed. books like this one. Russian books on Science are generally great and uncommon. And I enjoy some very great poorly known books written by generally unknow russian scientists. Of course, you have ever known about Landau and Lipshitz books but there are many other russian authors who deserve your attention.
3) Information Theory books. Classical information theory books for your curious minds are
An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise. Dover Pub. 2nd Revised ed. 1980. John. R. Pierce.
A really nice and basic book about classical Information Theory.
An introduction to Information Theory. Dover Books on Mathematics. F.M.Reza. Basic book for beginners.
The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Claude E. Shannon and W.Weaver.Univ. of Illinois Press.
A classical book by one of the fathers of information and communication theory.
Mathematical Foundations of Information Theory. Dover Books on Mathematics. A.Y.Khinchin.
A “must read” if you are interested in the mathematical foundations of IT.