Entropy and information: the many faces of their relationship

SEBASTIAN FORTIN; OLIMPIA LOMBARDI

Londres

Congreso; Summer Symposium 2014 of the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry; 2014

London School of Economics, Londres

Although entropy plays an important role in chemistry, its interpretation is still a matter of debate. On the other hand, during the last decades the concept of information has pervaded almost all domains of science, but with no consensus about its nature. The fact that the two concepts are usually connected does not contribute to clarification. The purpose of this presentation is to compare the Boltzmann and the Gibbs concepts of entropy with the Shannon and the von Neumann concepts of information, in order to show that the relationship between entropy and information is not as straightforward as usually supposed.