Remarkable progress of quantum information theory (QIT) allowed to formulate mathematical theorems for conditions that data-transmitting or data-processing occurs with a non-negative entropy gain. However, relation of these results formulated in terms of entropy gain in quantum channels to temporal evolution of real physical systems is not thoroughly understood. Here we build on the mathematical formalism provided by QIT to formulate the quantum H-theorem in terms of physical observables. We discuss the manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics in quantum physics and uncover special situations where the second law can be violated. We further demonstrate that the typical evolution of energy-isolated quantum systems occurs with non-diminishing entropy. [1]
Footnotes
[1]
G. B. Lesovik, A. V. Lebedev, I. A. Sadovskyy, M. V. Suslov, and V. M. Vinokur, “H-theorem in quantum physics,” Scientific Reports, vol. 6. Springer Nature, p. 32815, 12-Sep-2016 [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep32815
“The notion that counting more shapes in the sky will reveal more details of the Big Bang is implied in a central principle of quantum physics known as “unitarity.” Unitarity dictates that the probabilities of all possible quantum states of the universe must add up to one, now and forever; thus, information, which is stored in quantum states, can never be lost — only scrambled. This means that all information about the birth of the cosmos remains encoded in its present state, and the more precisely cosmologists know the latter, the more they can learn about the former.”
Many readers often ask me for resources for delving into the basics of information theory. I hadn’t posted it before, but the Santa Fe Institute recently had an online course Introduction to Information Theory through their Complexity Explorer, which has some other excellent offerings. It included videos, fora, and other resources and was taught by the esteemed physicist and professor Seth Lloyd. There are a number of currently active students still learning and posting there.
Introduction to Information Theory
About the Tutorial:
This tutorial introduces fundamental concepts in information theory. Information theory has made considerable impact in complex systems, and has in part co-evolved with complexity science. Research areas ranging from ecology and biology to aerospace and information technology have all seen benefits from the growth of information theory.
In this tutorial, students will follow the development of information theory from bits to modern application in computing and communication. Along the way Seth Lloyd introduces valuable topics in information theory such as mutual information, boolean logic, channel capacity, and the natural relationship between information and entropy.
Lloyd coherently covers a substantial amount of material while limiting discussion of the mathematics involved. When formulas or derivations are considered, Lloyd describes the mathematics such that less advanced math students will find the tutorial accessible. Prerequisites for this tutorial are an understanding of logarithms, and at least a year of high-school algebra.
About the Instructor(s):
Professor Seth Lloyd is a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1982, the Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics (Part III) and an M. Phil. in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University in 1983 and 1984 under a Marshall Fellowship, and a Ph.D. in Physics in 1988 from Rockefeller University under the supervision of Professor Heinz Pagels.
From 1988 to 1991, Professor Lloyd was a postdoctoral fellow in the High Energy Physics Department at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with Professor Murray Gell-Mann on applications of information to quantum-mechanical systems. From 1991 to 1994, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked at the Center for Nonlinear Systems on quantum computation. In 1994, he joined the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Since 1988, Professor Lloyd has also been an adjunct faculty member at the Sante Fe Institute.
Professor Lloyd has performed seminal work in the fields of quantum computation and quantum communications, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, demonstrating the viability of quantum analog computation, proving quantum analogs of Shannon’s noisy channel theorem, and designing novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduction.
Professor Lloyd is a member of the American Physical Society and the Amercian Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Tutorial Team:
Yoav Kallus is an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. His research at the boundary of statistical physics and geometry looks at how and when simple interactions lead to the formation of complex order in materials and when preferred local order leads to system-wide disorder. Yoav holds a B.Sc. in physics from Rice University and a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University. Before joining the Santa Fe Institute, Yoav was a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science in Princeton University.
A review of Summa Technologiae by Stanislaw Lem by David Auerbach from the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Summa Technologiae
AT LAST WE have it in English. Summa Technologiae, originally published in Polish in 1964, is the cornerstone of Stanislaw Lem’s oeuvre, his consummate work of speculative nonfiction. Trained in medicine and biology, Lem synthesizes the current science of the day in ways far ahead of most science fiction of the time.
I came across this book review quite serendipitously today via an Auerbach article in Slate, which I’ve bookmarked. I found a copy of the book and have added it to the top of my reading pile. As I’m currently reading an advance reader edition of Sean Carroll’sThe Big Picture, I can only imagine how well the two may go together despite being written nearly 60 years apart.
Information is a precise concept that can be defined mathematically, but its relationship to what we call "knowledge" is not always made clear. Furthermore, the concepts "entropy" and "information", while deeply related, are distinct and must be used with care, something that is not always achieved in the literature. In this elementary introduction, the concepts of entropy and information are laid out one by one, explained intuitively, but defined rigorously. I argue that a proper understanding of information in terms of prediction is key to a number of disciplines beyond engineering, such as physics and biology.
Comments: 19 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society A
Subjects: Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems (nlin.AO); Information Theory (cs.IT); Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph); Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM)
Cite as:arXiv:1601.06176 [nlin.AO] (or arXiv:1601.06176v1 [nlin.AO] for this version)
Prior to the holidays Sean wrote a blogpost that contains a full overview table of contents, which will give everyone a stronger idea of its contents. For convenience I’ll excerpt it below.
As it was published, I had read Kevin Hartnett’s article and interview with Christoph Adami The Information Theory of Life in Quanta Magazine. I recently revisited it and read through the commentary and stumbled upon an interesting quote relating to the history of information in biology:
Polymath Adami has ‘looked at so many fields of science’ and has correctly indicated the underlying importance of information theory, to which he has made important contributions. However, perhaps because the interview was concerned with the origin of life and was edited and condensed, many readers may get the impression that IT is only a few decades old. However, information ideas in biology can be traced back to at least 19th century sources. In the 1870s Ewald Hering in Prague and Samuel Butler in London laid the foundations. Butler’s work was later taken up by Richard Semon in Munich, whose writings inspired the young Erwin Schrodinger in the early decades of the 20th century. The emergence of his text – “What is Life” – from Dublin in the 1940s, inspired those who gave us DNA structure and the associated information concepts in “the classic period” of molecular biology. For more please see: Forsdyke, D. R. (2015) History of Psychiatry 26 (3), 270-287.
For those interested in reading more on this historical tidbit, I’ve dug up a copy of the primary Forsdyke reference which first appeared on arXiv (prior to its ultimate publication in History of Psychiatry [.pdf]):
Abstract: Today’s ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) concept is rooted in the distinction of nineteenth century philosopher William Clifford between ‘objects’ that can be directly perceived, and ‘ejects,’ such as the mind of another person, which are inferred from one’s subjective knowledge of one’s own mind. A founder, with Charles Darwin, of the discipline of comparative psychology, George Romanes considered the minds of animals as ejects, an idea that could be generalized to ‘society as eject’ and, ultimately, ‘the world as an eject’ – mind in the universe. Yet, Romanes and Clifford only vaguely connected mind with the abstraction we call ‘information,’ which needs ‘a vehicle of symbols’ – a material transporting medium. However, Samuel Butler was able to address, in informational terms depleted of theological trappings, both organic evolution and mind in the universe. This view harmonizes with insights arising from modern DNA research, the relative immortality of ‘selfish’ genes, and some startling recent developments in brain research.
Comments: Accepted for publication in History of Psychiatry. 31 pages including 3 footnotes. Based on a lecture given at Santa Clara University, February 28th 2014, at a Bannan Institute Symposium on ‘Science and Seeking: Rethinking the God Question in the Lab, Cosmos, and Classroom.’
The original arXiv article also referenced two lectures which are appended below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3yNbTUCPd4
[Original Draft of this was written on December 14, 2015.]
References
[1]
D. Forsdyke R., “‘A vehicle of symbols and nothing more’. George Romanes, theory of mind, information, and Samuel Butler,” History of Psychiatry, vol. 26, no. 3, Aug. 2015 [Online]. Available: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0957154X14562755
Yesterday, via a notification from Lanyard, I came across a notice for the upcoming conference “The Information Universe” which hits several of the sweet spots for areas involving information theory, physics, the origin of life, complexity, computer science, and microbiology. It is scheduled to occur from October 7-9, 2015 at the Infoversum Theater in Groningen, The Netherlands.
I’ll let their site speak for itself below, but they already have an interesting line up of speakers including:
Keynote speakers
Erik Verlinde, Professor Theoretical Physics, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Alex Szalay, Alumni Centennial Professor of Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University, USA
Gerard ‘t Hooft, Professor Theoretical Physics, University of Utrecht, Netherlands
Gregory Chaitin, Professor Mathematics and Computer Science, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Charley Lineweaver, Professor Astronomy and Astrophysics, Australian National University, Australia
Lude Franke, Professor System Genetics, University Medical Center Groningen, Netherlands
Infoversum Theater, The Netherlands
Conference synopsis from their homepage:
The main ambition of this conference is to explore the question “What is the role of information in the physics of our Universe?”. This intellectual pursuit may have a key role in improving our understanding of the Universe at a time when we “build technology to acquire and manage Big Data”, “discover highly organized information systems in nature” and “attempt to solve outstanding issues on the role of information in physics”. The conference intends to address the “in vivo” (role of information in nature) and “in vitro” (theory and models) aspects of the Information Universe.
The discussions about the role of information will include the views and thoughts of several disciplines: astronomy, physics, computer science, mathematics, life sciences, quantum computing, and neuroscience. Different scientific communities hold various and sometimes distinct formulations of the role of information in the Universe indicating we still lack understanding of its intrinsic nature. During this conference we will try to identify the right questions, which may lead us towards an answer.
Is the universe one big information processing machine?
Is there a deeper layer in quantum mechanics?
Is the universe a hologram?
Is there a deeper physical description of the world based on information?
How close/far are we from solving the black hole information paradox?
What is the role of information in highly organized complex life systems?
The Big Data Universe and the Universe : are our numerical simulations and Big Data repositories (in vitro) different from real natural system (in vivo)?
Is this the road to understanding dark matter, dark energy?
The conference will be held in the new 260 seats planetarium theatre in Groningen, which provides an inspiring immersive 3D full dome display, e.g. numerical simulations of the formation of our Universe, and anything else our presenters wish to bring in. The digital planetarium setting will be used to visualize the theme with modern media.
John Baez, one of the organizers of the workshop, is also going through them and adding some interesting background and links on his Azimuth blog as well for those who are looking for additional details and depth
Over the next few days, I’ll be maintaining a Storify story covering information related to and coming out of the Information Theory and Entropy Workshop being sponsored by NIMBios at the Unviersity of Tennessee, Knoxville.
For those in attendance or participating by watching the live streaming video (or even watching the video after-the-fact), please feel free to use the official hashtag #entropyWS, and I’ll do my best to include your tweets, posts, and material into the story stream for future reference.
For journal articles and papers mentioned in/at the workshop, I encourage everyone to join the Mendeley.com group ITBio: Information Theory, Microbiology, Evolution, and Complexity and add them to the group’s list of papers. Think of it as a collaborative online journal club of sorts.
Those participating in the workshop are also encouraged to take a look at a growing collection of researchers and materials I maintain here. If you have materials or resources you’d like to contribute to the list, please send me an email or include them via the suggestions/submission form or include them in the comments section below.
Editor’s note: On 12/12/17 Storify announced they would be shutting down. As a result, I’m changing the embedded version of the original data served by Storify for an HTML copy which can be found below:
I’m giving a short 30-minute talk at a workshop on Biological and Bio-Inspired Information Theory at the Banff International Research Institute. I’ll say more about the workshop later, but here’s my talk: * Biodiversity, entropy and thermodynamics. Most of the people at this workshop study neurobiology and cell signalling, not evolutionary game theory or…
I’m having a great time at a workshop on Biological and Bio-Inspired Information Theory in Banff, Canada. You can see videos of the talks online. There have been lots of good talks so far, but this one really blew my mind: * Naftali Tishby, Sensing and acting under information constraints—a principled approach to biology and…
John Harte is an ecologist who uses maximum entropy methods to predict the distribution, abundance and energy usage of species. Marc Harper uses information theory in bioinformatics and evolutionary game theory. Harper, Harte and I are organizing a workshop on entropy and information in biological systems, and I’m really excited about it!
John Harte, Marc Harper and I are running a workshop! Now you can apply here to attend: * Information and entropy in biological systems, National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, Knoxville Tennesee, Wednesday-Friday, 8-10 April 2015. Click the link, read the stuff and scroll down to “CLICK HERE” to apply.
There will be a 5-day workshop on Biological and Bio-Inspired Information Theory at BIRS from Sunday the 26th to Friday the 31st of October, 2014. It’s being organized by * Toby Berger (University of Virginia) * Andrew Eckford (York University) * Peter Thomas (Case Western Reserve University) BIRS is the Banff International Research Station,…
How does it feel to (co-)write a book and hold the finished product in your hands? About like this: Many, many thanks to my excellent co-authors, Tadashi Nakano and Tokuko Haraguchi, for their hard work; thanks to Cambridge for accepting this project and managing it well; and thanks to Satoshi Hiyama for writing a nice blurb.
You may have seen our PLOS ONE paper about tabletop molecular communication, which received loads of media coverage. One of the goals of this paper was to show that anyone can do experiments in molecular communication, without any wet labs or expensive apparatus.
INFORMATION THEORY is the new central discipline. This graph was from 20y ago in the seminal book Cover and Thomas, as the field was starting to be defined. Now Information Theory has been expanded to swallow even more fields.
Born in, of all disciplines, Electrical Engineering, the field has progressively infiltrating probability theory, computer science, statistical physics, data science, gambling theory, ruin problems, complexity, even how one deals with knowledge, epistemology. It defines noise/signal, order/disorder, etc. It studies cellular automata. You can use it in theology (FREE WILL & algorithmic complexity). As I said, it is the MOTHER discipline.
I am certain much of Medicine will naturally grow to be a subset of it, both operationally, and in studying how the human body works: the latter is an information machine. Same with linguistics. Same with political “science”, same with… everything.
I am saying this because I figured out what the long 5th volume of the INCERTO will be. Cannot say now with any precision but it has to do with a variant of entropy as the core natural generator of Antifragility.
[Revised to explain that it is not *replacing* other disciplines, just infiltrating them as the point was initially misunderstood…]
[My comments posted to the original Facebook post follow below.]
I’m coming to this post a bit late as I’m playing a bit of catch up, but agree with it wholeheartedly.
In particular, applications to molecular biology and medicine are really beginning to come to a heavy boil in just the past five years. This particular year is the progenitor of what appears to be the biggest renaissance for the application of information theory to the area of biology since Hubert Yockey, Henry Quastler, and Robert L. Platzman’s “Symposium on Information Theory in Biology at Gatlinburg, Tennessee” in 1956.
Upcoming/recent conferences/workshops on information theory in biology include:
I’ll note in passing, for those interested, that Claude Shannon’s infamous master’s thesis at MIT (in which he applied Boolean Algebra to electric circuits allowing the digital revolution to occur) and his subsequent “The Theory of Mathematical Communication” were so revolutionary, nearly everyone forgets his MIT Ph.D. Thesis “An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics” which presaged the areas of cybernetics and the current applications of information theory to microbiology and are probably as seminal as Sir R.A Fisher’s applications of statistics to science in general and biology in particular.
For those commenting on the post who were interested in a layman’s introduction to information theory, I recommend John Robinson Pierce’s An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise (Dover has a very inexpensive edition.) After this, one should take a look at Claude Shannon’s original paper. (The MIT Press printing includes some excellent overview by Warren Weaver along with the paper itself.) The mathematics in the paper really aren’t too technical, and most of it should be comprehensible by most advanced high school students.
For those that don’t understand the concept of entropy, I HIGHLY recommend Arieh Ben-Naim’s book Entropy Demystified The Second Law Reduced to Plain Common Sense with Seven Simulated Games. He really does tear the concept down into its most basic form in a way I haven’t seen others come remotely close to and which even my mother can comprehend (with no mathematics at all). (I recommend this presentation to even those with Ph.D.’s in physics because it is so truly fundamental.)
For the more advanced mathematicians, physicists, and engineers Arieh Ben-Naim does a truly spectacular job of extending ET Jaynes’ work on information theory and statistical mechanics and comes up with a more coherent mathematical theory to conjoin the entropy of physics/statistical mechanics with that of Shannon’s information theory in A Farewell to Entropy: Statistical Thermodynamics Based on Information.
For the advanced readers/researchers interested in more at the intersection of information theory and biology, I’ll also mention that I maintain a list of references, books, and journal articles in a Mendeley group entitled “ITBio: Information Theory, Microbiology, Evolution, and Complexity.”
In recent years, ideas such as “life is information processing” or “information holds the key to understanding life” have become more common. However, how can information, or more formally Information Theory, increase our understanding of life, or life-like systems?
Information Theory not only has a profound mathematical basis, but also typically provides an intuitive understanding of processes, such as learning, behavior and evolution terms of information processing.
In this special issue, we are interested in both:
the information-theoretic formalization and quantification of different aspects of life, such as driving forces of learning and behavior generation, information flows between neurons, swarm members and social agents, and information theoretic aspects of evolution and adaptation, and
the simulation and creation of life-like systems with previously identified principles and incentives.
Topics with relation to artificial and natural systems:
information theoretic intrinsic motivations
information theoretic quantification of behavior
information theoretic guidance of artificial evolution
information theoretic guidance of self-organization
information theoretic driving forces behind learning
information theoretic driving forces behind behavior
information theory in swarms
information theory in social behavior
information theory in evolution
information theory in the brain
information theory in system-environment distinction
information theory in the perception action loop
information theoretic definitions of life
Submission
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Entropy is an international peer-reviewed Open Access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 28 February 2015
Special Issue Editors
Guest Editor Dr. Christoph Salge
Adaptive Systems Research Group,University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, AL10 9AB Hatfield, UK
Website: http://homepages.stca.herts.ac.uk/~cs08abi
E-Mail: c.salge@herts.ac.uk
Phone: +44 1707 28 4490 Interests: Intrinsic Motivation (Empowerment); Self-Organization; Guided Self-Organization; Information-Theoretic Incentives for Social Interaction; Information-Theoretic Incentives for Swarms; Information Theory and Computer Game AI
Guest Editor Dr. Georg Martius
Cognition and Neurosciences, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences Inselstrasse 22, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
Website: http://www.mis.mpg.de/jjost/members/georg-martius.html
E-Mail: martius@mis.mpg.de
Phone: +49 341 9959 545 Interests: Autonomous Robots; Self-Organization; Guided Self-Organization; Information Theory; Dynamical Systems; Machine Learning; Neuroscience of Learning; Optimal Control
Guest Editor Dr. Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi
Information Theory of Cognitive Systems, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences Inselstrasse 22, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
Website: http://personal-homepages.mis.mpg.de/zahedi
E-Mail: zahedi@mis.mpg.de
Phone: +49 341 9959 535 Interests: Embodied Artificial Intelligence; Information Theory of the Sensorimotor Loop; Dynamical Systems; Cybernetics; Self-organisation; Synaptic plasticity; Evolutionary Robotics
Guest Editor Dr. Daniel Polani
Department of Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield AL10 9AB, UK
Website: http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~comqdp1/
E-Mail: d.polani@herts.ac.uk Interests: artificial intelligence; artificial life; information theory for intelligent information processing; sensor Evolution; collective and multiagent systems
I rarely, if ever, reblog anything here, but this particular post from John Baez’s blog Azimuth is so on-topic, that attempting to embellish it seems silly.
Entropy and Information in Biological Systems (Part 2)
John Harte, Marc Harper and I are running a workshop! Now you can apply here to attend:
Click the link, read the stuff and scroll down to “CLICK HERE” to apply. The deadline is 12 November 2014.
Financial support for travel, meals, and lodging is available for workshop attendees who need it. We will choose among the applicants and invite 10-15 of them.
The idea
Information theory and entropy methods are becoming powerful tools in biology, from the level of individual cells, to whole ecosystems, to experimental design, model-building, and the measurement of biodiversity. The aim of this investigative workshop is to synthesize different ways of applying these concepts to help systematize and unify work in biological systems. Early attempts at “grand syntheses” often misfired, but applications of information theory and entropy to specific highly focused topics in biology have been increasingly successful. In ecology, entropy maximization methods have proven successful in predicting the distribution and abundance of species. Entropy is also widely used as a measure of biodiversity. Work on the role of information in game theory has shed new light on evolution. As a population evolves, it can be seen as gaining information about its environment. The principle of maximum entropy production has emerged as a fascinating yet controversial approach to predicting the behavior of biological systems, from individual organisms to whole ecosystems. This investigative workshop will bring together top researchers from these diverse fields to share insights and methods and address some long-standing conceptual problems.
So, here are the goals of our workshop:
To study the validity of the principle of Maximum Entropy Production (MEP), which states that biological systems – and indeed all open, non-equilibrium systems – act to produce entropy at the maximum rate.
To familiarize all the participants with applications to ecology of the MaxEnt method: choosing the probabilistic hypothesis with the highest entropy subject to the constraints of our data. We will compare MaxEnt with competing approaches and examine whether MaxEnt provides a sufficient justification for the principle of MEP.
To clarify relations between known characterizations of entropy, the use of entropy as a measure of biodiversity, and the use of MaxEnt methods in ecology.
To develop the concept of evolutionary games as “learning” processes in which information is gained over time.
To study the interplay between information theory and the thermodynamics of individual cells and organelles.
If you’ve got colleagues who might be interested in this, please let them know. You can download a PDF suitable for printing and putting on a bulletin board by clicking on this:
Christoph Adami
