THE MEASURE OF UNCERTAINTY: CLAUDE SHANNON AND THE INFORMATION AGE - Softcover

Kriger, Boris; Kriger, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798171953348

Verlag: Independently published, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

In 1948 a shy, unicycling engineer at Bell Laboratories published a paper that quietly rebuilt the twentieth century, and he did it by refusing to answer the most interesting question in his field. Claude Shannon wanted to know how much could be sent through a wire. He did not want to know what any of it meant. So he cut meaning out of the problem entirely, like a surgeon removing something inflamed, and discovered that what remained could be measured to the last decimal place.
That amputation gave us the bit, the compact disc, the mobile phone, the deep-space probe that whispers home across four billion miles without dropping a syllable, and the strange modern habit of describing absolutely everything, from DNA to consciousness to the universe itself, as information. Shannon spent the rest of his life politely asking people to stop. Nobody listened. He built a mechanical mouse, a machine whose only function was to switch itself off, and a wearable computer for cheating at roulette, and he seems to have enjoyed all of it more than the fame.
This book follows Shannon from a barbed-wire telegraph in rural Michigan to the cipher rooms of the Second World War, from the most consequential master's thesis ever written to the noisy-channel theorem that promised something no engineer had dared hope for. It then asks the question Shannon left standing on the table. If information is not a substance, what exactly is it, and what happens to physics when a role gets mistaken for a thing? Drawing on the author's own work in Information Substrate Theory, the book traces that mistake through cosmology, the statistics of galaxy fields, the undeciphered script of the Indus Valley, the accounting of the dark sector, and the question of whether invariance is evidence of anything at all.
It is a book about measurement, uncertainty, and the discipline of not saying more than you can support. It is also, unavoidably, a book about a man who juggled while riding a unicycle down the corridors of the most serious industrial laboratory on earth.
Keywords: Claude Shannon, information theory, entropy, communication, cosmology, philosophy of science, Information Substrate Theory

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Independently published
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798171953348
• Einband: Broché
• Anzahl der Seiten: 318
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Printed by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxemburg