Information Entropy Life And The Universe What We Know And What We Do Not Know

Author : Arieh Ben-Naim
Publisher : World Scientific Publishing Company Incorporated
ISBN 13 : 9789814651660
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Information, Entropy, Life and the Universe written by Arieh Ben-Naim and published by World Scientific Publishing Company Incorporated. This book was released on 2015 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Sean Carroll
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0593186591
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Biggest Ideas in the Universe written by Sean Carroll and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Most appealing... technical accuracy and lightness of tone... Impeccable.”—Wall Street Journal “A porthole into another world.”—Scientific American “Brings science dissemination to a new level.”—Science The most trusted explainer of the most mind-boggling concepts pulls back the veil of mystery that has too long cloaked the most valuable building blocks of modern science. Sean Carroll, with his genius for making complex notions entertaining, presents in his uniquely lucid voice the fundamental ideas informing the modern physics of reality. Physics offers deep insights into the workings of the universe but those insights come in the form of equations that often look like gobbledygook. Sean Carroll shows that they are really like meaningful poems that can help us fly over sierras to discover a miraculous multidimensional landscape alive with radiant giants, warped space-time, and bewilderingly powerful forces. High school calculus is itself a centuries-old marvel as worthy of our gaze as the Mona Lisa. And it may come as a surprise the extent to which all our most cutting-edge ideas about black holes are built on the math calculus enables. No one else could so smoothly guide readers toward grasping the very equation Einstein used to describe his theory of general relativity. In the tradition of the legendary Richard Feynman lectures presented sixty years ago, this book is an inspiring, dazzling introduction to a way of seeing that will resonate across cultural and generational boundaries for many years to come.

Author : Carlo Rovelli
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0735216118
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Order of Time written by Carlo Rovelli and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of TIME’s Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade "Meet the new Stephen Hawking . . . The Order of Time is a dazzling book." --The Sunday Times From the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality Is Not What It Seems, Helgoland, and Anaximander comes a concise, elegant exploration of time. Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to "flow"? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike. For most readers this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears. He explains how the theory of quantum gravity attempts to understand and give meaning to the resulting extreme landscape of this timeless world. Weaving together ideas from philosophy, science and literature, he suggests that our perception of the flow of time depends on our perspective, better understood starting from the structure of our brain and emotions than from the physical universe. Already a bestseller in Italy, and written with the poetic vitality that made Seven Brief Lessons on Physics so appealing, The Order of Time offers a profoundly intelligent, culturally rich, novel appreciation of the mysteries of time.

Author : Jeremy England
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 1541699009
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Every Life Is on Fire written by Jeremy England and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A preeminent physicist unveils a field-defining theory of the origins and purpose of life. Why are we alive? Most things in the universe aren't. And everything that is alive traces back to things that, puzzlingly, weren't. For centuries, the scientific question of life's origins has confounded us. But in Every Life Is on Fire, physicist Jeremy England argues that the answer has been under our noses the whole time, deep within the laws of thermodynamics. England explains how, counterintuitively, the very same forces that tend to tear things apart assembled the first living systems. But how life began isn't just a scientific question. We ask it because we want to know what it really means to be alive. So England, an ordained rabbi, uses his theory to examine how, if at all, science helps us find purpose in a vast and mysterious universe. In the tradition of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, Every Life Is on Fire is a profound testament to how something can come from nothing.

Author : Sean Carroll
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0452296544
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book From Eternity to Here written by Sean Carroll and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An accessible and engaging exploration of the mysteries of time." -Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe Twenty years ago, Stephen Hawking tried to explain time by understanding the Big Bang. Now, Sean Carroll says we need to be more ambitious. One of the leading theoretical physicists of his generation, Carroll delivers a dazzling and paradigm-shifting theory of time's arrow that embraces subjects from entropy to quantum mechanics to time travel to information theory and the meaning of life. From Eternity to Here is no less than the next step toward understanding how we came to exist, and a fantastically approachable read that will appeal to a broad audience of armchair physicists, and anyone who ponders the nature of our world.

Author : Arieh Ben-Naim
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Entropy written by Arieh Ben-Naim and published by . This book was released on 2020-12-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The greatest blunder ever in the history of science. The Second Law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, is one of the longest-standing laws of physics, unchanged even by the last century's two drastic revolutions in physics. However, the concept of entropy has long been misinterpreted and misused - making it the greatest ever blunder in the history of science, propagated for decades by scientists and non-scientists alike. This blunder was initially and primarily brought on by a deep misunderstanding of the concept of entropy. Ironically, ignorance about the meaning of entropy has led some scientists to associate entropy with ignorance, and the Second Law with the "law of spreading ignorance." In his book, Arieh Ben-Naim, a respected professor of physical chemistry, attempts to right these wrongs. He scrutinizes twelve misguided definitions and interpretations of entropy, brings order to the chaos, and finally lays out the true meaning of entropy in clear and accessible language anyone can understand.

Author : Arieh Ben-Naim
Publisher : World Scientific
ISBN 13 : 9813223472
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Four Laws That Do Not Drive The Universe written by Arieh Ben-Naim and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2017-08-14 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a clear and mystery-free presentation of the central concepts in thermodynamics — probability, entropy, Helmholtz energy and Gibbs energy. It presents the concepts of entropy, free energy and various formulations of the Second Law in a friendly, simple language. It is devoid of all kinds of fancy and pompous statements made by authors of popular science books who write on this subject. The book focuses on the Four Laws of Thermodynamics. As it is said in the dedication page, this book is addressed to readers who might have already been exposed to Atkins' book having a similar title. It challenges both the title, and the contents of Atkins' book, Four Laws That Drive The Universe. One can glean from the title of this new book that the author's views are diametrically opposed to the views of Atkins. The book is addressed to any curious and intelligent reader. It aims to tickle, and hopefully to satisfy your curiosity. It also aims to challenge your gray matter, and to enrich your knowledge by telling you some facts and ideas regarding the Four Laws of Thermodynamics.

Author : Arieh Ben-Naim
Publisher : World Scientific
ISBN 13 : 9813208821
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Information Theory written by Arieh Ben-Naim and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2017-05-26 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the definition of the Shannon measure of Information, and some derived quantities such as conditional information and mutual information. Unlike many books, which refer to the Shannon's Measure of information (SMI) as "Entropy," this book makes a clear distinction between the SMI and Entropy. In the last chapter, Entropy is derived as a special case of SMI. Ample examples are provided which help the reader in understanding the different concepts discussed in this book. As with previous books by the author, this book aims at a clear and mystery-free presentation of the central concept in Information theory — the Shannon's Measure of Information. This book presents the fundamental concepts of Information theory in a friendly-simple language and is devoid of all kinds of fancy and pompous statements made by authors of popular science books who write on this subject. It is unique in its presentation of Shannon's measure of information, and the clear distinction between this concept and the thermodynamic entropy. Although some mathematical knowledge is required by the reader, the emphasis is on the concepts and their meaning rather on the mathematical details of the theory.

Author : Mario Alemi
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030259625
Total Pages : 125 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Amazing Journey of Reason written by Mario Alemi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Open Access book explores questions such as why and how did the first biological cells appear? And then complex organisms, brains, societies and –now– connected human societies? Physicists have good models for describing the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang, but can we apply the same concepts to the evolution of aggregated matter –living matter included? The Amazing Journey analyzes the latest results in chemistry, biology, neuroscience, anthropology and sociology under the light of the evolution of intelligence, seen as the ability of processing information. The main strength of this book is using just two concepts used in physics –information and energy– to explain: The emergence and evolution of life: procaryotes, eukaryotes and complex organisms The emergence and evolution of the brain The emergence and evolution of societies (human and not) Possible evolution of our "internet society" and the role that Artificial Intelligence is playing

Author : John E.J. Schmitz
Publisher : Elsevier
ISBN 13 : 0815519303
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Second Law of Life written by John E.J. Schmitz and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2007-01-22 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this compelling, and important book, John Schmitz brings order to the world of chaos that surrounds us. The Second Law of Life refers to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, which is an omnipresent force that quietly and crucially determines every aspect of our society, culture and daily lives. Unless we come to understand entropy, future generations will face consequences of the unstoppable laws of physics. Entropy explains the amount of energy no longer capable of doing work; in other words, wasted energy or heat loss. Each moment of every day, we lose irreplaceable energy and ômodernö technology is not helping. In fact, it is accelerating the problem at a catastrophic rate. û And we will ultimately face a heat death crisis and utter destruction of the Earth. Even actions we take to improve the environment may actually do more damage than good. For example, recycling is considered environmentally, socially and politically correct. Under the influence of entropy, however, it is a prolific waster of energy; we must look at entire systems, not just parts. It is critical that we find ways to reduce energy loss. Seeing the problems with greater clarity will lead to solutions. This fascinating and accessible journey through the second law of thermodynamics is a step in the right direction.