This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for.

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

Numbers instill a feeling for the lie of the land, and furnish grist for the mathematical mill that is the physicist's principal tool.

If the intensity of the material world is plotted along the horizontal axis, and the response of the human mind is on the vertical, the relation between the two is represented by the logarithmic curve. Could this rule provide a clue to the relationship between the objective measure of information, and our subjective perception of it?

We don't know what energy is, any more than we know what information is, but as a now robust scientific concept we can describe it in precise mathematical terms, and as a commodity we can measure, market, regulate and tax it.

Science has taught us that what we see and touch is not what is really there.

The smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information.