Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everythingin the Cosmos, fromOu r Brains to Black Holes Paperback – Illustrated, 30 Jan. 2007

I am amazed at the negative tone of some of the reviews on Amazon UK and feel the need to try to redress the balance. This is anexcellent introduction to the topic of information in science, including classical information theory, thermodynamics (the linkbetween thermodynamic entropy, statistical mechanics and information), the coding of information in DNA, neural networks in thebrain, relativity, quantum information and computing, and what happens to information entering a black hole.This is a book at the popular science level, so of course there is a limit to the depths with which it treats its topics and theamount of mathematics it employs. The style is journalistic, though at somewhat greater depth than one would find in, say, NewScientist, and clearly this isn't to everyone's taste. Highlights for me were the discussions of Maxwell's Demon, the spear-in-the-barn paradox (relativity), the reason that the speed of light is a limit on the speed of information (emphasis) transfer, quantumdecoherence and why 'Schroedinger's Cat' doesn't work, and the quantum zeno effect. I learned plenty from this book that I didn'tknow or hadn't understood, and I strongly recommend it. If you want these topics in greater depth (and this book is an encouragementfor that), look it up in Wikipedia or buy a textbook.Does this book make a convincing case for the information paradigm? For those of us wedded to the idea of energy and matter as the keyconcepts in physics it is not easy to make the switch to the (even more) abstract concept of information, but this book goes a prettylong way to easing the transition, and it's an enjoyable and informative ride.

Firstly, aside from the reservations of the previous reviews, I enjoyed reading this, and anyone who wants to start looking into Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and such would find useful information in here. Particularly the spear-runner-and-barn paradox demonstrates the in-depth quality of Relativity and how it is so perverse to our every-day experience. True, the Quantum Information part could have done with a little more explanation, but for me, I found it easy(ish) to follow and a thirst to delve into it more from outside sources.This was also my first contact with information theory, and it does provide a good framework for understanding it. It begins with simple examples that we would give no consideration to, but analyzing it from the standpoint of information theory gives you a feel of what it means, then onto how it applies in more detailed settings, and then onto bizarre quantum information.It does introduce a lot of new ideas quite quickly (you need to understand superposition before quantum information, which requires some understanding of quantum physics, so you have to get through a fair bit before you get to the main bit.)If you enjoyed Seife's other books, you will most likely enjoy this one - but not quite as much

Seife begins with an introduction to information theory. He talks about redundancy and the relationship of entropy and probability to information. He recalls the work of Turing and Shannon. Then he reviews relativity as he leads us to quantum mechanics. He recalls the paradox of Schrodinger's cat and other peculiarities of QM.In general what he tries to explain to the general reader is how science is reinvestigating the fundamentals of physics from the standpoint of information theory, which apparently is going to replace physics. If Seife is correct, professors of physics are going to become professors of information theory, if that hasn't already happened. To me replacing matter and energy with information is not helpful. But to physicists apparently it is not only helpful but something splendid.Consequently, there is a kind of "gee whiz" quality to Seife's expression, a quality that I found somewhat off-putting. Enthusiasm is fine and the ready acceptance of new ideas is agreeable when the ideas have experimental backing. For example he writes (speaking of a hypothetical creature inside the event horizon of a black hole): "...no matter how hard it tried, the creature would be utterly unable to send us a message...The pull of the black hole is too strong. Even if there were a huge population of these creatures swirling around the black hole, all screaming and signaling as loud as they possibly could, Earth would never receive a single bit or qubit of information about them." (pp. 242-243)Considering the physical conditions inside a black hole, the image of creatures "screaming and signaling" is absurd to say the least, and frankly ludicrous.Also there is this from page 248: "Indeed, most cosmologists think that the universe is infinitely large...that it has no borders--and that it doesn't have a funky shape that curls around on itself, as a handful of scientists have unconvincingly argued. If you take a rocket ship and travel in one direction for years and years and years, you will never come across an uncrossable boundary and you will never revisit the place you set off from."This is news to me. The universe is infinite? It used to be the case that the one thing that physicists wanted banished from their equations was any notion of infinity! All kinds of absurdities, paradoxes and incomprehensibles would pop up when infinities were allowed. Speaking of which, Seife also champions the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics over the standard Copenhagen interpretation put forward by Bohr and Heisenberg.Personally, I've always liked the many worlds interpretation because it is so audacious and because it expands the mind so wonderfully. However, if, as Seife seems to imply, most physicists believe in the many worlds interpretation, I must say I am astounded. What is going on? The many worlds interpretation leads to parallel universes! universes that cannot be detected by any means we know of. They actually cannot be part of any real physics since there is no experimental method that allows us to search for or detect parallel universes.Has physics come to this? Are the postmoderns right? Is physics now no more than a cultural construct that doesn't even care whether its theories are falsifiable or not? Are Newton and Einstein and James Clerk Maxwell rolling over in their graves? To me the "spooky action at a distance," and particles being in the same place at the same time, and the startling fact that an observation of any kind will always disturb a quantum event to an uncertainty, etc., is nowhere near as benumbing as the idea that a new universe is created with every tick of a quantum divergence. I mean I love it, but how can I believe it?There's also a superficial quality to this book that is hard to get away from. It's as though Seife does not understand such things as entanglement and superposition well enough to explain them to the general reader. However he's not alone in this. Even the best books on QM for the general reader (e.g., The Quantum World: Quantum Physics for Everyone (2004) by Kenneth Ford), have left me feeling dissatisfied. Perhaps it is impossible to convey the reality of quantum mechanics to non-physicists. However, there is no excuse for falling into such an expression as this: "Parallel universes reveal how superposition works, and how distant entangled particles can instantly 'communicate' with each other over vast distances." (p. 242) This is like saying "vampires reveal how blood nourishes cells in the body." You start with a imaginary entity (a parallel universe, a vampire) and you conclude that this entity reveals something. Parallel universes may exist but nobody has seen one yet, and almost by definition nobody ever will, so it is specious to claim they reveal anything.Here's yet another example of this sort of fuzzy writing to which Seife--a professor of journalism, by the way, and the author of the acclaimed Zero (2000) and Alpha and Omega (2003)--is inexplicable drawn: "The mysteries of quantum mechanics become much less mysterious--once you believe that information creates the structure of space and time." (p. 242) I have no idea how information might create the structure of space and time, and I certainly cannot comprehend how my belief in such a notion might make QM less mysterious. Seife really needs to explain how this might work. No doubt the failing is mine. However, I suspect I'm not alone.Bottom line: this book is fun to read, but exasperating because of its fuzzy superficiality. The superficiality may be unavoidable, but the fuzziness is not.

The author mistakes clarity for verbosity and in the end I don't know what is he trying to tell us.The subtitle says that information science can provide a different view of everything. Instead of telling us what is this view, we are forced first to go first through the usual typical topics in popular science: a oversimplified explanation of quantum physics, relativity, what is entropy, etc.When the time comes to cover the specific topics of the book, quantum computing is explained very fast, and without clarity. Regarding the implications to the "cosmos", the author first adheres to the "decoherence" interpretation of quantum mechanics, and a few chapters later he bases the reasoning in the "multiple worlds" interpretation, which he takes seriously and claims that is "rapidly becoming the favorite of physicists" [sic]. He should be better informed.

I am beginning to accept that information is a fundamental construct in our living multiverse. That being said it is only logical that consciousness is necessary to sort this information. Charles Seife has done a good job decoding information and I particularly learned a lot from his initial chapter on redundancy. For a long time I have had trouble with redundancy and have always been preoccupied with backups to everything. Coding to produce a master algorithm will be easier the closer we get to perfecting the identification of redundancy.

It's a "hard" book if you don't know about physics, communication theory, etc... but if you read it you will feel that Matrix it's closer than you think ;-)PD: I never understood the entrophy until I read this book

It is a great achievement such a clear, entertaining and transcendent book about information theory. This topic is so hard to grasp due tos its counterintuitive nature, but the author was able to explain it in such a way that you can understand all the implications in the physical world but keeping all its weirdness and oddity. After reading this book, you won't need charlatans to bring magic to your life: nature is way more bizarre and science can give you all that magic and, as a plus, it is true.

Information is the key to the mysteries of the universe, according to Charles Seife, author of Zero and now of Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes (Penguin Books, 2006, ii + 296 pp.). This information is not like the letters on a page (which encode information that allows us to read words), though it includes that. It also includes any kind of charge or registered change of state, such as a 0 or 1 in computer talk. In fact, anything that can be represented by 0's and 1's is information, and all information can be so registered. In explaining how information theory has transformed thinking in the sciences, Seife covers a lot of ground--cosmology, quantum theory, biology, etc., etc.Seife does a fine job of explaining some key concepts in information theory, such as redundancy--the use of clues to indicate what some piece of information actually is. One such is the use of vowels even when not needed for capturing the words. Th ct n th ht, probably does not need the vowels to be understood. `Ingenius' and `ingenuous' would, however. One thing I did not know, meaning I was utterly clueless about, is that computers, which use compressed files that eliminate all sorts of redundancy, do make errors, though we virtually never see them because there are built-in checks and balances that catch and correct them. Since a computer operates entirely on 0's and 1's, or, more literally, on charges and lack of charges, all information that we normally think of as information can be recorded in this way.What Seife wishes to show is that information theory underlies physics and other sciences and that understanding that much helps to deal with a variety of problems, from probabilities to the famous Schrödinger's cat to black holes and what happens around them. He also discusses some problems that have yet to be resolved. Without attempting to explain his explanations, which make sense upon reading but can be difficult to keep clearly in mind, he uses as examples DNA sequences, mathematical formulas for the expansion of gases (which exactly parallel equations for the transmission of information!), and probabilities associated with questions like the state of Schrödinger's cat before anyone looks. He illuminates the issue of light functioning as a wave and as particles through information theory, showing that, while light might be considered neither or both, thought of as information resolves the paradoxes associated with it.The book, as he warns, has a dreary side, since information is closely tied to entropy, the diffusion of energy until it is evenly distributed throughout the universe. Information theory itself suggests that we are doomed to a future (incomprehensibly long in the future) when all information disappears, that is, entropy is total. For information requires differences in energy levels--a distinction between 0 and 1, so to speak--to exist, and, for Seife, everything is information. The time will come when there will be no such differences. There are more immediate threats to our existence, however.

Charles Seife has not been the first to proclaim that the most fundamental entity in the universe is "information". Physicist John Wheeler, David Bohm, and Tom Siegfried among others have held this view as well, but no other author I've read has gone to such lengths to establish this idea as an undeniable conclusion. In a consise staight-forward format, Siefe delves into biology, computer science, cosmology, Relativity, and quantum theory, to establish the notion that information and the second law of thermodynamics are intricately linked. And he does this without ever allowing the reader to become lost or confused. Information is always physical, whether it is marks on paper, holes in a punch card, atoms in an electo-magnetic state on a CD, photon polarization, or up/down spin on an electron. All information has a physical representation. And like any physical thing in our universe, it abides by the laws of nature, including the laws of thermodynamics and Relativity. Information, like energy, can neither be created nor destroyed. Infomation always moves toward the most probable state: maximum entropy. And no information can travel faster than the speed of light. The qubit, which is the quantum representation of the classical bit, abides by the laws of quantum physics, and despite the weird instantaneous quantum connection between particles in an entangled state demonstrated by Bell's theorem of inequality; the qubit does not violate faster-than-light communication. Oddly, the qubit does violate one tenant of Relativity--that no effect can precede its cause. It seems that the time-asymetrical qubit has no "before" or "after". Unlike the classical bit wich resides in a binary, either/or state, the qubit can be in a superposition of states: Two states simultaneously. This fact is what makes the possibility of quantum computing so enticing. By nesting probable outcomes in a superposition of states many fewer yes/no questions are needed in algorithms, making quantum computing many orders of magnitude faster than classical computing. But, far wider implications exist for the quantum qubit. Siefe believes that the qubit's superposition of states solves two contentious vagaries of the Copenhagen Interpretation of reality: What constitutes an observer? And is there a difference between the classical and quantum worlds? Siefe says that there is no clear-cut demarcation between the subatomic and classical world, and there is no conscious observer required to collapse the wave function. This directly leads to a resolution of the famous Schrodinger's cat paradox. Since the universe at large is constantly involved in probing with light waves, neutrinos, and zero point energy, the universe itself acts as the observer. Large macro objects such as cats undergo decoherence (a collapse of the superposition of states into a classical bit) very rapidly, while a single subatomic particle or photon take a much longer time, being less likely to come into contact with nature's measurements. Information is so fundamental that Siefe believes Richard Dawkins popular book called "The Selfish Gene", would have been more appropriately titled "Selfish Information". Siefe says that when it comes to biological organisms, information is even more selfish than the gene, and can run contrary to survival of the fittest. He cites several examples of information reproducing itself even though it is detrimental to the organism, and at times, to the entire species. Information will attempt to replicate even at the expense of the proliferation of the organism carrying the information. This book was very enticing, and left me with some questions. Is it information that is the most basic entity, or is it "meaning" as physicist David Bohm maintains? Is there a difference between information and meaning? Experiments with polarization of light lead me to suspect that there is a difference. And, finally, is the brain really a classical machine as Siefe says, or is it a quantum machine as Evan Harris Walker maintains? (See my review: "The Physics of Consciousness" on Amazon). Either way, Charles Seife is right on the mark with this work. I give this book 4.5 stars for being an excellent and fun read. This review by David Kreiter, author of Quantum Reality: A New Philosophical Perspective.