Time has been called God's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once. In the same spirit, noise is Nature's way of making sure that we don't find out everything that happens. Noise, in short, is the protector of information.

As every bookie knows instinctively, a number such as reliability - a qualitative rather than a quantitative measure - is needed to make the valuation of information practically useful.

Both induction and deduction, reasoning from the particular and the general, and back again from the universal to the specific, form the essence to scientific thinking.

For generations, field guides to plants and animals have sharpened the pleasure of seeing by opening our minds to understanding. Now John Adam has filled a gap in that venerable genre with his painstaking but simple mathematical descriptions of familiar, mundane physical phenomena. This is nothing less than a mathematical field guide to inanimate nature.

Entropy is not about speeds or positions of particles, the way temperature and pressure and volume are, but about our lack of information.

The problem of defining exactly what is meant by the signal velocity, which cropped up as long ago as 1907, has not been solved.

In order to understand information, we must define it; bit in order to define it, we must first understand it. Where to start?