Chaos

1 Comment

  1. Jonathan Davies says

    Hi James, I hope you don’t mind me writing to you directly.
    I read Chaos a few years ago, an incredible book, Thankyou!

    There is a passage which keeps turning over in my head.
    Page 258
    “To Robert Shaw, strange attractors were engines of information. In his first and greatest conception, chaos offered a natural way of returning to the physical sciences, in reinvigorated form, the ideas that information theory had drawn from thermodynamics. strange attractors, conflating order and disorder, gave a challenging twist to the question of measuring a system’s entropy. Strange attractors served as efficient mixers. They created unpredictability. They raised entropy. And as Shaw saw it, they created information where none existed.”

    I wanted to read more on this subject.
    I have read a few books on Information theory(including yours), but they don’t address this concept…
    that “chaos can create information where none existed”
    ….could you recommend further reading?

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