01 February 2021

Hans C von Baeyer - Collected Quotes

"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." (Hans Christian von Baeyer, "Information, The New Language of Science", 2003)

"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." (Hans Christian von Baeyer, "Information, The New Language of Science", 2003)

"Entropy is not about speeds or positions of particles, the way temperature and pressure and volume are, but about our lack of information." (Hans C von Baeyer," Information, The New Language of Science", 2003)

"If quantum communication and quantum computation are to flourish, a new information theory will have to be developed." (Hans Christian von Baeyer, "Information, The New Language of Science", 2003)

"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?" (Hans Christian von Baeyer, "Information, The New Language of Science", 2003)

"If you don't understand something, break it apart; reduce it to its components. Since they are simpler than the whole, you have a much better chance of understanding them; and when you have succeeded in doing that, put the whole thing back together again." (Hans Christian von Baeyer, "Information, The New Language of Science", 2003)"

"In fact, an information theory that leaves out the issue of noise turns out to have no content." (Hans Christian von Baeyer, "Information, The New Language of Science", 2003)

"Nowhere is the difference between either/or and both/and more clearly apparent than in the context of information." (Hans Christian von Baeyer, "Information, The New Language of Science", 2003)

"Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense." (Hans Christian von Baeyer, "Information, The New Language of Science", 2003)

"The smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information." (Hans Christian von Baeyer, "Information, The New Language of Science", 2003)

"The solution of the Monty Hall problem hinges on the concept of information, and more specifically, on the relationship between added information and probability." (Hans Christian von Baeyer, "Information, The New Language of Science", 2003)

"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." (Hans Christian von Baeyer, "Information, The New Language of Science", 2003)

"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." (Hans Christian von Baeyer, "Information, The New Language of Science", 2003)

"Eventually, mechanical models failed too. They were duly abandoned, and replaced by much more abstract mathematical models. Compared to their predecessors, mathematical models are Spartan affairs. They consist of equations and formulas without the texture, the color, the visual detail - without the rich appeal - of their mechanical relatives. […] But what a mathematical model lacks in charm, it more than makes up for in generality and predictive power." (Hans C von Baeyer, "QBism: The future of quantum physics", 2016)

"Quantum theory can be thought of as the science of constructing wavefunctions and extracting predictions of measurable outcomes from them. […] The wavefunction is a little bit like a map - the best possible kind of map. It encodes all that can be said about a quantum system." (Hans C von Baeyer, "QBism: The future of quantum physics", 2016)

"Random means without reason - unpredictable - lawless. That little word random describes a key difference between ordinary classical mechanics and quantum mechanics. […] In classical physics only ignorance of the fine details or lack of control over them causes statistical randomness […] In principle, though not in practice, randomness is absent from classical physics." (Hans C von Baeyer, "QBism: The future of quantum physics", 2016)

"The aim of physics is not merely to tell a convincing story about every object and every event in the material universe but to produce a single epic, a coherent theory for describing nature." (Hans C von Baeyer, "QBism: The future of quantum physics", 2016)

"The goal of physics is to explain the workings of the nonliving world. At first, philosophers described the properties of real objects: the wandering of planets across the night sky, the formation of ice, or the sound of a lyre. When attention turned to things that couldn’t be seen or measured so easily, physicists invented mechanical models to take the place of real things." (Hans C von Baeyer, "QBism: The future of quantum physics", 2016)

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