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Whether it's packed into a bar code, encrypted
in a secret wartime message, or sucked into a black hole
in the far reaches of the galaxy, information is everywhere
-- and it's not just an abstract concept. Information is
a concrete property of matter and energy that's every bit
as real as the weight of a chunk of lead, something that
sits inside every living cell and is inscribed upon every
cosmic phenomenon. The red-hot science of information theory
is today the place where biologists, physicists, and chemists
are converging to break the last remaining codes of the
universe.
With his gift for making cutting-edge science
accessible and entertaining, Charles Seife explains how
information theory, once the province of codebreakers and
telephone companies, became the crucial science of our time.
Starting with the breaking of the Enigma code during World
War II and building momentum during the computer revolution,
information theory is now at the forefront of theoretical
physics. Seife highlights the surprises revealed when we
start decoding information: that the universe is half spent;
that the entire human race has less genetic diversity than
the average group of two dozen chimpanzees; that the act
of living itself can be seen as the act of replicating and
preserving information despite nature's attempt to destroy
it. We meet up with some of the towering figures of modern
science, as well as a few strange beasts -- Schrödinger's
cat and Maxwell's demon.
The laws of information are answering some
of the most profound questions of science -- but those answers
are often more disturbing than the paradoxes they solve.
Information leads to a picture of the universe speeding
toward its own demise, of living creatures as slaves to
parasites within, and of a byzantine cosmos made up of endless
parallel universes. Lucid and exhilarating, Decoding
the Universe probes the mind-boggling ways in which
the laws of information are giving physicists a new approach
to understanding the darkest mysteries that humanity has
ever pondered.
Charles Seife, is the author of Alpha
& Omega and Zero, which won the PEN/Martha
Albrand Award for first non-fiction book and was named a
New York Times Notable Book. Seife received an MS
in probability theory and artificial intelligence from Yale,
and is an associate professor of journalism at New York
University. He has written for Science magazine,
New Scientist, Scientific American, The
Economist, Wired, The Sciences, and many
other publications. He lives in New York City.
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