Talk:Physical information

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents

[edit] Cleanup

I marked this article as needing cleanup because it reads like original research. This in itself is not bad, but it definitely needs reworking. It's full of HTML, and worse, full of first-person mentions. ("we will use the phrase nugget of information", "This will enable us to refer", etc.) I tried to clean it myself but got bogged down in trying to figure out a more neutral way to state things. --Golbez 20:57, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

"We" and "us" used in that way are not first-person at all; they are not to be taken literally. It is commonplace in writing mathematics to use such locutions involving first-person plural pronouns without intending them literally. Michael Hardy 23:37, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Shouldn't we use the third person, "one shall", "enables one", instead? It sounds better.
That's a matter of opinion, or dialect. To many Americans, "one" sounds awkward and overly formal. Note that "we/us" is shorter. Also, "we" can be useful as a way of engaging the reader in the discussion and being inclusive. That is, "we" can be intended to refer to the author, the readers, and other thinkers. --Mpfrank 6/14/05
I converted the HTML to Wiki markup, and, in light of the disputedness of the appropriateness of the use of "we/us", I am removing the cleanup tag. --Mpfrank 6/14/05

Also, I have another problem I would like to request help from. I am trying to explain the concept that information in the main information article is a property than can even affect physical events without human intervention save for observation. Also about the phenomena about heat being released when information is destroyed. I do not remember the name of the theory, nor am I skilled enough to fully explain it. Therefore I request help in explaining it over there. -- Natalinasmpf 23:31, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

See the reversible computing page for a discussion of why information erasure causes energy dissipation. --Mpfrank 6/14/05

At some point, the citations contained in the article were broken, when someone changed the reference list from a numbered list to bullets. Someone who knows how to do citations in Wiki-markup should fix this. I will do it myself (since I know which citations were intended to go to which reference-list items) when I have a chance, but it may not be for a while. Mike Frank (talk) 11:45, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Etymology

I moved the section on the etymology of the word "information" from this page to the main Information page, since that seemed to be a more logical place for it. --Mpfrank 6/14/05

[edit] "Nugget" terminology removed

I decided that I didn't like using the word "nugget" for the instance of a form associated with a physical thing, because the phrase "nugget of information" seems to connote something permanent and unchangeable, whereas instances of information held by physical systems in the real world could be mutable if those systems aren't static entities. Also, in ordinary language, a "nugget of information" means a particularly important or useful fact, whereas I wasn't using it in that sense. So, I changed all occurrences of the word "nugget" in the discussion to the more neutral term "instance," and I also introduced the term "holder" to refer to an explicitly mutable instance. I'm still not completely happy with the term "instance," though, because a form itself should be immutable, and so if an instance is a mutable thing, then it's not really an instance of a form. I'm still searching for a word that really conveys what I mean here. Perhaps to avoid confusion, an appropriate new word for the concept ought to be coined from Greek or Latin roots. --Mpfrank 1/12/06

[edit] B. Roy Frieden's anonymous POV-pushing edits

B. Roy Frieden claims to have developed a "universal method" in physics, based upon Fisher information. He has written a book about this. Unfortunately, while Frieden's ideas initially appear interesting, his claimed method is highly controversial:

Note that Frieden is Prof. Em. of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. The data.optics.arizona.edu anon has used the following IPs to make a number of questionable edits:

  1. 150.135.248.180 (talk · contribs)
    1. 20 May 2005 confesses to being Roy Frieden in real life
    2. 6 June 2006: adds cites of his papers to Extreme physical information
    3. 23 May 2006 adds uncritical description of his own work in Lagrangian and uncritically cites his own controversial book
    4. 22 October 2004 attributes the uncertainty principle to the Cramer-Rao inequality, which is potentially misleading
    5. 21 October 2004 adds uncritical mention of his controversial claim that the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution can be obtained via his "method"
    6. 21 October 2004 adds uncritical mention of his controversial claim that the Klein-Gordon equation can be "derived" via his "method"
  2. 150.135.248.126 (talk · contribs)
    1. 9 September 2004 adds uncritical description of his work to Fisher information
    2. 8 September 2004 adds uncritical description of his highly dubious claim that EPI is a general approach to physics to Physical information
    3. 16 August 2004 confesses IRL identity
    4. 13 August 2004 creates uncritical account of his work in new article, Extreme physical information
    5. 11 August 2004 creates his own wikibiostub, B Roy Frieden

These POV-pushing edits should be modified to more accurately describe the status of Frieden's work.---CH 21:54, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

  • I absolutely agree. Wikipedia is no place for crackpot theories. --141.154.235.107 03:32, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
    • Thank God, your not in control. Vufors 04:14, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Citations for the critics

This is a controversial topic that may be under dispute. Please read this page and discuss substantial changes here before making them.
Make sure to supply full citations when adding information and consider tagging or removing uncited/unciteable information.

We need some citations from real people and real papers before you can say this. Regards Vufors

  1. Frieden's alleged "method" for obtaining Lagrangians appears not to be well-defined[citation needed] . If so, one might suspect that this "method" is in fact merely a tool for constructing ad hoc "hand-waving" derivation of known results.[citation needed]
  2. The desired extremum of I − J may not always exist.[citation needed]
  3. Frieden appears to be trying to follow the model of Edwin Jaynes[citation needed], who applied Shannon's notion of information to physics in 1957 (following an even earlier observation of John von Neumann), which led to the principle of maximum entropy. However, while Shannon's entropy has a clear non-parametric rationale, the "information" interpretation of Fisher information is less clear[citation needed], particularly in the context of Fisher's claims, and apparently limits Frieden to one-parameter models.[citation needed]