On Jan 22, 7:26 pm, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote: > > Now, how does this relate to the thermodynamic entropy of the book? It > turns out that the information computed by the in-principle process > above is equal to the difference between the maximum entropy of the > molecules making up the book (if completely disassociated) and the > thermodynamic entropy, which could be measured in a calorimeter. > > > If yes, can one determine the > > information in the book just by means of experimental > > thermodynamics? > > One can certainly determine the information of the physical book > (defined however you might like) - but that is not the same as the > information of the abstract book.
This would only work of the information were meaningless and a- signifying. I can write a whole book with just the words "The movie Goodfellas". Anyone who has seen that movie has a rich text of memories from which to inform themselves through that association. That is what being informed actually is, associating and integrating presented texts with a body of accumulated texts and contexts. If you conflate information with the data that happens to be associated with a particular text in a particular language-media context, you are literally weighing stories by the pound (or gram). Besides, any such quantitative measure does not take sequence into account. A book or file which is completely scrambled down to the level of characters or pixels has the same quantity of entropy displacement as the in tact text. To reduce information to quantity alone means that a 240k text file can be rearranged to be 40kb of nothing but 1s and then 200kb of nothing but 0s and have the same amount of information and entropy. It's a gross misunderstanding of how information works. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
