What is Information?

Jan 24, 2007

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Abstract

Information permeates every corner of our lives and shapes our
universe. Understanding and harnessing information holds the potential for
significant advances. The breadth and depth of underlying concepts of
the science of information transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries
of scientific and commercial endeavors. Information can be manifested
in various forms: business information is measured in dollars;
chemical information is contained in shapes of molecules;
biological information stored and processed in our cells prolongs life.
So what is information? In this talk we first attempt to identify the
most important features of information and define it in the broadest
possible sense. We subsequently turn to the notion and theory of information
introduced by Claude Shannon in 1948 that served as the backbone for
digital communication. We go on to bridge Shannon information with
Boltzmann's entropy, Maxwell's demon, Landauer's principle and
Bennett's irreversible computations. We point out, however,
that while Shannon created a successful and beautiful theory
of information for communication, a wide spread application of information
theory to economics, biology, life science and complex networks seems to be
still awaiting us. We shall discuss some examples that recently crop up in
biology, chemistry, computer science, and quantum physics. We conclude
with a list of challenges for future research.
We hope to put forward some educated questions, rather than answers,
to the issues and tools that lay before researchers interested in information.