Goodreads | Dave Compton (The United States)’s review of Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes: “
Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes by Charles Seife
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I have bought this book 3 times. Each time I loaned it out to someone and needed another copy. I found it one of the most influential book I have read in a long time. Maybe a little has to do with the fact that the discovery or invention of information theory was by Claude Shannon who worked at Bell Labs and I also work at AT&T. It paints a view of the universe as being the exchange of information. The author gets into the idea that the laws of thermodynamics are the same as the laws of information. Without work, everything eventually reaches maximum randomness(think of gas molecules in a jar or cigar smoke in a room, it spreads out evenly eventually and reaches maximum entropy. Information follows the same law. It allows a scientist to record the sounds of dolphins and even though we can’t understand what their noises mean, if they are plotted you will get something non-random which means they are carrying information and are not just random sounds. We should be able to identify sounds from space and determine if they are random or follow a pattern which probably means there is information being sent. I am not a scientist so I might have misrepresented some of this but the bottom line is the universe is processing information everywhere and all the time from the stars to our cells and atoms.