by the late Nobel Laureate on the controversial issue of time's arrow. It's not clear he succeeded but his passion was never missing. He has consistently held in his books that nature is probabilistic even though his explanation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, that entropy can only hold constant or increase in an isolated system, has evolved. (For instance in acceding to Frank Tipler that gravity breaks invariance.) Much of his motivation seems to have been in sorting out why Boltzman and Gibbs failed to satisfy the science community that their statistical physics explained the 2nd law, due to reversible classical equations and Poincare recurrences. However in order to make his… Read more
of the late Nobel prize-winner's book. He has consistently held in his books that nature is probabilistic even though his explanation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, that entropy can only hold constant or increase in an isolated system, has evolved. Much of his motivation seems to have been in sorting out why Boltzman and Gibbs failed to satisfy the science community that their statistical physics explained the 2nd law, due to reversible classical equations and Poincare recurrences. However in order to make his probabilistic argument he may have created a loophole. He points to the Langevin equation as an irreversible equation with noise (friction) and he says Poincare should have… Read more
Good intro but dated, August 7, 2007 By Glenn L. E. May (Islington, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
The update of this book should have been updated. While it is understandable that at the time of the first print of this book in 1961 the author saw little or no practical use for Shannon's information theory (other than perhaps his channel capacity theorem) it was well known by the second printing in 1980 that it has profound implications in studying biology (and modern technology). For instance in an article published in Nature in 1967, A. L. MacKay showed how the genetic code is highly optimal using Huffman's algorithm. More recently Ardell and Sella (with summaries… Read more
