Hans Christian von Baeyer

"In order to understand information, we must define it; bit in order to define it, we must first understand it. Where to start?"

"This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we …"

"Both induction and deduction, reasoning from the particular and the general, and back again from the universal to the specific, form the essence to scientific thinking."

"As every bookie knows instinctively, a number such as reliability - a qualitative rather than a quantitative measure - is needed to make the valuation of information practically useful."

"Numbers instill a feeling for the lie of the land, and furnish grist for the mathematical mill that is the physicist's principal tool."

"Nowhere is the difference between either/or and both/and more clearly apparent than in the context of information."

"Entropy is not about speeds or positions of particles, the way temperature and pressure and volume are, but about our lack of information."

"Underneath the shifting appearances of the world as perceived by our unreliable senses, is there, or is there not, a bedrock of objective reality?"