Fumfer Physics 5: From Scholastic Thought to Claude Shannon

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The Latin informatio originally meant giving form or shape—" to give form to something." Scholastic thinkers adapted it to mean the soul being informed or "shaped" by truth or intellect. Medieval scholasticism, which dominated Europe from approximately 1100 to 1700, combined Christian theology and classical philosophy. Aristotle's doctrine of hylomorphism holds that every physical thing is a compound of matter (the substrate) and form (the actuality or organization). In scholastic thought, the soul was often seen as the substantial form of a living body—what makes a body alive.

The idea of information was conveyed between people. Natural philosophy saw it as descriptive—something collected, catalogued, and observed. In the nineteenth century, it took on bureaucratic and journalistic meanings. Then, in 1948, with Claude Shannon, we arrived at the modern definition: information as a measurable reduction of uncertainty, quantified in bits. So, Rick, how does that history relate to what you are describing about the origins of the term' information'?

Rosner: It really builds on the way you've described it—the form part of the word, the sense of giving form to something.

Information, you could argue, gives form to everything in the universe. The amount of information is proportional to the amount of definition the universe and its contents have.

In that way, it's a lucky pairing between the word and what would become the future understanding of the word—it's very appropriate. We've discussed the universe being defined by the number of particles, primarily photons and neutrinos, exchanged among the stable particles in the universe: protons, electrons, and neutrons. These interactions—

Like the "gunfight" I always reference in True Romance: everyone has a gun, everyone is shooting at everyone else. I used to call it a "Mexican gunfight," but I should stop because that's a racially tinged term. But the idea is that all these particle exchanges pin down the matter in the universe.

The fact that there isn't an infinite number of exchanges means the universe contains only a finite amount of information. Each particle is incompletely pinned down—"fuzzy"—and that fuzziness is essentially its Planck wavelength. It's a nice marriage between the word, which means "giving form," and one of the main ways information actually works.

Much of what has survived from the ancients is probably the most innovative material they said or wrote. They had some good ideas, but often lacked solid scientific evidence. The reasoning was clever but often wrong, because they were working from so little.

Some reasoning did work because they had enough evidence. For example, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth by measuring the shadows cast by two sticks simultaneously in different cities. He reasoned that the sun was directly overhead in one place, but not in the other, because of the Earth's curvature. He then performed calculations based on that observation.

Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth using shadows from two cities about fifty miles apart. I don't know how he determined "the same time" without clocks, but he figured it out and made a decent calculation.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.