Non-fiction 21 Aug 2004 15:47

The Bit and the Pendulum

coverThe Bit and the Pendulum
Tom Siegfried

The main point of this book is that everything in the universe can be explained in terms of information; that is, bits are the “fundamental particle” of the universe, and everything depends on them. To this end, the author goes to great lenghts to try to include a reasonable introduction to quantum mechanics and, from there, quantum computing. In the end, in my opinion, the result is a little confusing.

True, he makes some very good points, and some of the metaphors he uses are quite good. But the book as a whole feels a little “disconnected”, as if several subjects are being explored at once without much attention to how (or if) they are related. In some places, it also feels like the author in picking a metaphor and acting as if it were physically real.

As I mentioned, though, some parts of the book are interesting, such as the one about the “problem” with black holes violating time simmetry because they do not preserve information about things that fall into them (that is, theoretically there is no way to know what went into the construction of a black hole, even if you could have access to all the information currently stored in it). I am not an expert in any branch of physics, but, based on what the author says, it looks like a serious problem. There are also some good parts about information theory, and in general you can learn a little from this book about several other subjects. Still, it could have been better written and go deeper into the issues; the way it is, it seems to be much longer than it needs to (and it’s not a particularly long book).

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