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Charles Seife

Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes Paperback – Bargain Price, January 30, 2007

by Charles Seife (Author)

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The author of Zero explains the scientific revolution that is transforming the way we understand our world

Previously the domain of philosophers and linguists, information theory has now moved beyond the province of code breakers to become the crucial science of our time. In Decoding the Universe, Charles Seife draws on his gift for making cutting-edge science accessible to explain how this new tool is deciphering everything from the purpose of our DNA to the parallel universes of our Byzantine cosmos. The result is an exhilarating adventure that deftly combines cryptology, physics, biology, and mathematics to cast light on the new understanding of the laws that govern life and the universe.

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About the Author

Charles Seife is the author of Alpha and Omega and Zero, which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for first nonfiction book and was named a New York Times Notable Book. He is an associate professor of journalism at New York University and has written for Scientific American, the Economist, and many other publications.

Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); Reprint edition (January 30, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0143038397
ISBN-13: 978-0143038399
Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.6 x 7.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 54 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #752,373 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #58 in Artificial Intelligence Expert Systems
- #211 in Information Theory
- #693 in Scientific Research

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Mitch Haile

Fun with a wide variety of topics

January 27, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This was a fun read; I especially enjoyed all the jumping off points that I found in this book. While I know a great deal about information theory, my knowledge of physics and quantum mechanics and the histories is significantly limited and I found so many other fun books to chase down as a result of reading this.

The quantum entanglement at the end seemed a bit out of bounds, perhaps too much of a stretch, but I got a lot out of this. The author's style reminds me of Gleick but more technical, which was fine.

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Patrick

Great explanation of why the "ordinary" world doesn't show quantum effects

September 3, 2013

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This book is very fascinating. I think the most interesting part is a section that explains why quantum variability (such as superimposed states) are never observed on our ordinary level of sensation. My only complaint is that the book largely ignores the most interesting philosophical question lurking around much of the topics of this book: what is the mind, and how and why is it different from the physical world? It's certainly possible that the mind is nothing more than a brain, although this view currently fails to explain consciousness (I'm sorry, but information processing alone doesn't equal consciousness, and it never will!). And as Seife points out in this book, animal brains show no evidence of being quantum computers. As far as entropy is concerned, one of the largest sources of unexplained entropy (new information) is human creativity. A key question is, does this violate the physicists hypothesis that information is constant? It may not, but it's at least plausible that living creatures (and more importantly minds) create and expand information. From a philosophical perspective, this ultimately the most important question about Information.

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Jaume Puigbo Vila

Information theory, the third physics revolution of the XXth century

October 2, 2007

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The author has a degree in probability theory and artificial intelligence, but he is a professor of journalism and has therefore written a book which is both very entertaining and not too difficult to understand. The subject is information, which Seife claims is the third XXth century revolution in physics started by Claude Shannon and which has relations with the other two: Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

Of course, information is also related to thermodynamics and entropy, so the book contains a discussion of all these topics: thermodynamics, relativity and quantum mechanics. Famous conundrums such as Schroedinger's cat, entanglement, Maxwell's demon, etc. are analyzed from the point of view of information theory.

Here are some snippets of the book:

According to Seife, Einstein dictum "Nothing can travel faster than light" is really about information:" Information speed cannot exceed c". Another interesting fact is that what really causes computers to heat is the erasure of bits.

Seife describes recent achievements and experiments, proof that he is familiar with the latest results. One curious example is the solution of "the knight problem" in 2000 by using a DNA computer! Another one is that the entire human race has less genetic diversity than a few scores of chimps due to some kind of cataclysm about 500,000 years ago. A third one is the 1996 experiment demonstrating the existence of virtual particles (the so called Casimir effect).

In chapter 7, quantum computers are introduced and the possibility of the brain being one is briefly discussed. Unfortunately, it seems that Max Tegmark proved Roger Penrose wrong on this count. You begin to understand the power of quantum computation when the author describes Grover's algorithm to guess a number out of 16. Classically you need four yes/no answers to four questions. Grover manages the same task with two. Quantum computation reduces the complexity of some problems from n to square root of n.

I found also very interesting the reasons why the photoelectric effect cannot be explained by waves. On the other hand, interference cannot be explained by a corpuscular theory of light, so we are stuck with duality.

Towards the end, the author discusses black holes and the holographic principle: the quantity of information contained in a ball is not limited by its volume (surprisingly), but by its area. Since most cosmologists consider now the universe infinite (inflation seems to imply this) we are led, via the holographic bound, to the conclusion that the universe contains infinite copies of our own bubble universe. Seife admits that this is the most bizarre thing among the many ones described in his book.

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G. Anderson

Fascinating and enjoyable.

February 2, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This is a very interesting and well written book that shows the remarkable connection between thermodynamics and information theory which goes a long way toward explaining some of the stranger and more perplexing aspects of quantum theory, and black holes.

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