Information, meaning and physics: The intellectual evolution of the English School of Information Theory during 1946-1956

Abstract

Argument In this comparative historical analysis, we will analyze the intellectual tendency that emerged between 1946 and 1956 to take advantage of the popularity of communication theory to develop a kind of informational epistemology of statistical mechanics. We will argue that this tendency results from a historical confluence in the early 1950s of certain theoretical claims of the so-called English School of Information Theory, championed by authors such as Gabor (1956) or MacKay (1969), and from the attempt to extend the profound success of Shannon’s ([1948] 1993) technical theory of sign transmission to the field of statistical thermal physics. As a paradigmatic example of this tendency, we will evaluate the intellectual work of Léon Brillouin (1956), who, in the mid-fifties, developed an information theoretical approach to statistical mechanical physics based on a concept of information linked to the knowledge of the observer.

Chemical Systems for Wetware Artificial Life: Selected Perspectives in Synthetic Cell Research

“…The word information, on the other hand, literally means “to shape, give form to” (from Latin in + formare ), i.e., generating a change in the receiver to account for some aspects of reality, unknown before. Theories about these aspects of information, which can be defined as “semantic”, were already present in the early days of cybernetics [ 94 , 95 , 96 , 97 , 98 ], especially in the so-called British school [ 99 ]. MacKay pointed out that semantic information is related to what information “does” when received by an agent.…”