“Book Descriptions: The science of information is the most influential, yet perhaps least appreciated field in science today. Never before in history have we been able to acquire, record, communicate, and use information in so many different forms. Never before have we had access to such vast quantities of data of every kind. This revolution goes far beyond the limitless content that fills our lives, because information also underlies our understanding of ourselves, the natural world, and the universe. It is the key that unites fields as different as linguistics, cryptography, neuroscience, genetics, economics, and quantum mechanics. And the fact that information bears no necessary connection to meaning makes it a profound puzzle that people with a passion for philosophy have pondered for centuries.
Table of Contents
LECTURE 1 The Transformability of Information 4 LECTURE 2 Computation and Logic Gates 17 LECTURE 3 Measuring Information 26 LECTURE 4 Entropy and the Average Surprise 34 LECTURE 5 Data Compression and Prefix-Free Codes 44 LECTURE 6 Encoding Images and Sounds 57 LECTURE 7 Noise and Channel Capacity 69 LECTURE 8 Error-Correcting Codes 82 LECTURE 9 Signals and Bandwidth 94 LECTURE 10 Cryptography and Key Entropy 110 LECTURE 11 Cryptanalysis and Unraveling the Enigma 119 LECTURE 12 Unbreakable Codes and Public Keys 130 LECTURE 13 What Genetic Information Can Do 140 LECTURE 14 Life’s Origins and DNA Computing 152 LECTURE 15 Neural Codes in the Brain 169 LECTURE 16 Entropy and Microstate Information 185 LECTURE 17 Erasure Cost and Reversible Computing 198 LECTURE 18 Horse Races and Stock Markets 213 LECTURE 19 Turing Machines and Algorithmic Information 226 LECTURE 20 Uncomputable Functions and Incompleteness 239 LECTURE 21 Qubits and Quantum Information 253 LECTURE 22 Quantum Cryptography via Entanglement 266 LECTURE 23 It from Bit: Physics from Information 281 LECTURE 24 The Meaning of Information 293” DRIVE