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8 - Entropy of information

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2014

Don S. Lemons
Affiliation:
Bethel College, Kansas
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Summary

Messages and message sources

Information technologies are as old as the first recorded messages, but not until the twentieth century did engineers and scientists begin to quantify something they called information. Yet the word information poorly describes the concept the first information theorists quantified. Of course specialists have every right to select words in common use and give them new meaning. Isaac Newton, for instance, defined force and work in ways useful in his theory of dynamics. But a well-chosen name is one whose special, technical meaning does not clash with its range of common meanings. Curiously, the information of information theory violates this commonsense rule.

Compare the opening phrase of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times … with the sequence of 50 letters, spaces, and a comma: eon jhktsiwnsho d ri nwfnn ti losabt,tob euffr te … taken from the tenth position on the first 50 pages of the same book. To me the first is richly associative; the second means nothing. The first has meaning and form; the second does not. Yet these two phrases could be said to carry the same information content because they have the same source. Each is a sequence of 50 characters taken from English text.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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  • Entropy of information
  • Don S. Lemons, Bethel College, Kansas
  • Book: A Student's Guide to Entropy
  • Online publication: 05 September 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511984556.009
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  • Entropy of information
  • Don S. Lemons, Bethel College, Kansas
  • Book: A Student's Guide to Entropy
  • Online publication: 05 September 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511984556.009
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Entropy of information
  • Don S. Lemons, Bethel College, Kansas
  • Book: A Student's Guide to Entropy
  • Online publication: 05 September 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511984556.009
Available formats
×