“If you don't understand something, break it apart; reduce it to its components. Since they are simpler than the whole, you have a much better chance of understanding them; and when you have succeeded in doing that, put the whole… — Hans Christian Von Baeyer Copy Share Image
For generations, field guides to plants and animals have sharpened the pleasure of seeing by opening our minds to understanding. Now John Adam has filled a gap in that venerable genre with his painstaking but simple mathematical descriptions of familiar,… — Hans Christian von Baeyer Copy Share Image
Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, invented a way to measure 'the amount of information' in a message without defining the word 'information'… — Hans Christian von Baeyer Copy Share Image
We don't know what energy is, any more than we know what information is, but as a now robust scientific concept we can describe… — Hans Christian von Baeyer Copy Share Image
To put it one way, a collection of Shakespeare's plays is richer than a phone book that uses the same number of letters; to… — Hans Christian von Baeyer Copy Share Image
Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain. — Hans Christian von Baeyer Copy Share Image
Underneath the shifting appearances of the world as perceived by our unreliable senses, is there, or is there not, a bedrock of objective reality? — Hans Christian von Baeyer Copy Share Image
In fact, an information theory that leaves out the issue of noise turns out to have no content. — Hans Christian von Baeyer Copy Share Image
Numbers instill a feeling for the lie of the land, and furnish grist for the mathematical mill that is the physicist's principal tool. — Hans Christian von Baeyer Copy Share Image
If the intensity of the material world is plotted along the horizontal axis, and the response of the human mind is on the vertical,… — Hans Christian von Baeyer Copy Share Image
This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms… — Hans Christian von Baeyer Copy Share Image
The problem of defining exactly what is meant by the signal velocity, which cropped up as long ago as 1907, has not been solved. — Hans Christian von Baeyer Copy Share Image
Both induction and deduction, reasoning from the particular and the general, and back again from the universal to the specific, form the essence to… — Hans Christian von Baeyer Copy Share Image
