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"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 audience: 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.
- Sales Rank: #562207 in Books
- Brand: Arieh Ben-naim
- Published on: 2015-05-18
- Released on: 2015-03-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.16" w x 6.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 492 pages
From the Inside Flap
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.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A good dose of reality for the educated layman..
By Frank Bierbrauer
At last we have an honest popular science book filled with facts, with solid concrete ideas not wild speculation or the usual tomes filled with statements which over emphasise what science can do. Too many times have I seen what passes for popular science, sometimes written by respected scientists, whereby they attempt to glorify the achievements of science with highly dubious statements. It is this kind of hyperbole which has for ever turned me off just about every popular science books.
This book by Ben-Naim is divided into 4 chapters. The first introduces the idea of information finally leading to Shannon's measure of information (SMI). This is followed by plenty of examples both from simple ideas of probability and 20 question games to various mixing processes. The second chapter then concentrates on thermodynamic entropy for various processes in isolated systems as well as discussions of the arrow of time in the second law and the common interpretation of entropy as disorder. These two chapters are then used to study how both information and entropy are related to the processes of life. This includes a study of the molecular structure of DNA, information storage in the brain as well as some discussion about so-called neg-entropy and feeding on information. The last chapter concentrates instead on the universe and studies how many scientists have speculated on the entropy of the universe as well as its SMI. These two things are very different from each other and it is clear that even great scientists mistake the two or equate them.
This book is an attempt to clarify these issues as they remain an ambiguous and confused mess in the popular science literature. The conclusions are that thermodynamic entropy is only ever defined for an isolated system at equilibrium which clearly cannot be properly defined for either living beings or the universe. In addition, information, as it is studied using Shannon's information theory, overcomes some of these weaknesses and can still be defined for a system that is not in equilibrium nor isolated provided that a probability distribution is defined for it. These clarifications completely demystify the speculative statements made in other popular science literature. A good dose of reality for the educated layman.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Dangerous Idea: Demanding Rigor in Science Writing
By John Anderson
Arieh Ben-Naim’s latest book in a series of 5 books about the perplexing topic of entropy and information is a brave attempt to bring precision and rigor to a topic that has befuddled many readers of popular science books. In this volume he directly challenges several current popular authors who apply the concepts of entropy and information to topics like life, evolution, and the universe in ways that are confusing and, to use one of Ben-Naim’s favorite adjectives, meaningless. One hopes that some of these scientists and science writers will respond and clarify or defend their writing. This would benefit the curious public greatly. Full disclosure: I was a proof reader of an early draft of the book because I was hoping the book would stimulate debate on several topics that I love to study.
The first two chapters are a thorough and lengthy tutorial on information theory as developed by Claude Shannon of Bell Labs and entropy, that elusive concept developed by Clausius, Thomson, Boltzmann, and Gibbs. There is a less rigorous mathematical focus in this book compared to his earlier volumes, but there is still plenty to digest especially if you go to the end notes every time there is a reference. Setting the stage requires 275 out of the 406 pages. (I’m not sure that all of the math is error free.)
Why spend so much time on basics? To address a root of the problem. Many statements by well known authors “are the result of confusing information with SMI (Shannon’s Measure of Information), then confusing SMI with entropy, and finally applying entropy to predict the fate of life and of the universe.”
To bring his points home Ben-Naim badgers the reader by repetition and alternative explanations. The terminology brings much baggage that must be stripped away. For example, Shannon developed what is called information theory but it is really communication theory. His work deals with the transmission of error free data over communication links. It does not address the content of the message, i.e. it doesn’t concern what we colloquially call information. Shannon didn’t care if the message was written by Shakespeare or Daffy Duck. The term “bit” is a unit of information on the same level as centimeter is a unit of length. Some people claim the universe is made of bits. “But the bit is a unit of information, not information, and certainly not the smallest possible chunk of information.”
The last two chapters apply the concepts to living systems and the universe. I am particularly interested in the concepts of the entropy of the universe and black hole entropy, particularly Sean Carroll’s Past Hypothesis which Carroll asserts explains the arrow of time. Ben-Naim criticizes the popular writing on these topics for lacking a justification for using the term “entropy” in these cases. The “entropy of the universe” may be totally meaningless since the universe is not a well defined thermodynamic system at equilibrium and we have no way to measure it.
Similarly a black hole “is far from being well-defined and well-characterized object. Trying to estimate its entropy based on its mass, energy or the area of its horizon is, at best, making an estimate of the entropy of the BH if that would be definable. It does not provide any additional information beyond that.”
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Entropy is abused without understanding its meaning
By Liu Xiao
This book is Arieh Ben-Naim's latest book on entropy. Before this one, he has already written several books on entropy. This book is a concise summary of his opinions on this topic. It explains the difference and connection between the thermodynamic entropy and the informational entropy (which is called SMI in this book). It also criticizes the many of the erroneous or meaningless statements on entropy and information.
However, beyond a simple summary, the author went further. In this book, he provided his deep thinking on how entropy and the Second Law are related to life and universe. Even though I have already read many of Arieh Ben-Naim's other books on entropy, I still felt that I learned a lot from this book. If you haven’t read any of Arieh Ben-Naim's book on entropy, I recommend you to read this one.
When I was reading this book, it reminded me of the debating on the meaning of infinity and infinitesimal. The infinitesimal numbers, or the “Newton’s fluxions,” were once derided as "the ghosts of departed quantities" by Bishop Berkeley. For a century, the infinity and infinitesimal were mysterious to people, and there were so much misuse and misunderstanding of them. Fortunately, after the formalization of limitations and convergences, we have already fully understood them. Today, we won’t debate on the value of 1 – 1 + 1 – 1 + ... or 1 + (1/2) + (1/3) + ... anymore, because we know it does not exist.
I hope the same fortune happens to entropy too. And I do think this book is the right one to read. Clearly, the word “entropy” has been abused, without understanding its meaning. Some people know that thermodynamic entropy has a direction (by the Second Law, it is always increasing for an isolated system). Those people also notice that many other things also have directions, like time, evolution (from primitive to complex), life (from birth to death), memory (remember past but not future). They then draw the conclusion that all these things have directions for a same reason. Among these things, entropy seems to be the most mysterious (and fancy) one, so they claim that every phenomenon that has direction is driven by entropy. Moreover, since the information entropy (SMI) happens to have “entropy” in its name, information becomes another almighty driver of every one-direction phenomenon.
I have been reading so many statements like this since I was a child, and I have always been failed to see the “deep connection” between entropy and many other one-direction phenomenon as they claimed. Until I read Arieh Ben-Naim's books, I finally realized that this is because they are wrong. Thermodynamic entropy is well-defined only for systems that are in thermodynamic equilibrium, e.g., some ideal gas with no macroscopic change. Certainly life and the universe are not in thermodynamic equilibrium, so talking about their entropy is meaningless. The universe may ended with the so-called “heat death”, and the time indeed has a direction (as far as I feel...). However, these have nothing to do with entropy, at least the entropy that is defined for thermodynamic equilibrium systems.
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