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Information, Entropy, Life, and the Universe

In 2015, I wrote a book with the same title as this article. The book’s subtitle is: “What we know and what we do not know.” On the book’s dedication page, I wrote: “This book is dedicated to readers of popular science books who are baffled, perplexed, puzzled, astonished, confused, and discombobula...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Ben-Naim, Arieh
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9689250/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36359725
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e24111636
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author Ben-Naim, Arieh
author_facet Ben-Naim, Arieh
author_sort Ben-Naim, Arieh
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description In 2015, I wrote a book with the same title as this article. The book’s subtitle is: “What we know and what we do not know.” On the book’s dedication page, I wrote: “This book is dedicated to readers of popular science books who are baffled, perplexed, puzzled, astonished, confused, and discombobulated by reading about Information, Entropy, Life and the Universe.” In the first part of this article, I will present the definitions of two central concepts: the “Shannon measure of information” (SMI), in Information Theory, and “Entropy”, in Thermodynamics. Following these definitions, I will discuss the framework of their applicability. In the second part of the article, I will examine the question of whether living systems and the entire universe are, or are not within the framework of applicability of the concepts of SMI and Entropy. I will show that much of the confusion that exists in the literature arises because of people’s ignorance about the framework of applicability of these concepts.
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spelling pubmed-96892502022-11-25 Information, Entropy, Life, and the Universe Ben-Naim, Arieh Entropy (Basel) Article In 2015, I wrote a book with the same title as this article. The book’s subtitle is: “What we know and what we do not know.” On the book’s dedication page, I wrote: “This book is dedicated to readers of popular science books who are baffled, perplexed, puzzled, astonished, confused, and discombobulated by reading about Information, Entropy, Life and the Universe.” In the first part of this article, I will present the definitions of two central concepts: the “Shannon measure of information” (SMI), in Information Theory, and “Entropy”, in Thermodynamics. Following these definitions, I will discuss the framework of their applicability. In the second part of the article, I will examine the question of whether living systems and the entire universe are, or are not within the framework of applicability of the concepts of SMI and Entropy. I will show that much of the confusion that exists in the literature arises because of people’s ignorance about the framework of applicability of these concepts. MDPI 2022-11-10 /pmc/articles/PMC9689250/ /pubmed/36359725 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e24111636 Text en © 2022 by the author. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Ben-Naim, Arieh
Information, Entropy, Life, and the Universe
title Information, Entropy, Life, and the Universe
title_full Information, Entropy, Life, and the Universe
title_fullStr Information, Entropy, Life, and the Universe
title_full_unstemmed Information, Entropy, Life, and the Universe
title_short Information, Entropy, Life, and the Universe
title_sort information, entropy, life, and the universe
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9689250/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36359725
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e24111636
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