Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T06:43:50.289Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Concept of Information and the Unity of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

John Wilkinson
John Wilkinson*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An attempt is made in this paper to analyze the purely formal nature of information-theoretic concepts. The suggestion follows that such concepts, used to supplement the logical and mathematical structure of the language of science, represent an addition to this language of such a sort as to allow the use of a unitary language for the description of phenomena. (The alternative to this approach must be certain multi-linguistic and mutually untranslatable descriptions of related phenomena, as with the various versions of Complementarity).

This conception is tested for the specific case of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, in order to show that, with the assumption of a suitable and intuitively satisfactory definition of the quantity of information contained in a measurement, the Heisenberg Principle becomes an informational restriction arising from the formal properties of the symbols of a given language rather than as a “law” of nature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , October 1961 , pp. 406 - 413
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1961

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This paper was delivered at the International Congress for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Stanford, August, 1960.

References

1 Rapoport, A. Synthèse, ix, p. 171 (1954).

2 Wiener, N. “Cybernetics”, John Wiley, New York (1948).

3 Shannon, C. E., and Weaver, W. “The Mathematical Theory of Communication”, University of Illinois Press, Urbana (1949).

4 Schouten, J. F. Synthèse, ix, pp. 199-204 (1954).

5 Bohr, N. passim, e.g., Nature, 121 (1928).

6 Gabor, D. J. Inst. Elec. Engnrs. (London), 93, part III, p. 429, (1946).