This is the first in series of short photo blog posts discussing the ideas of Carl Sagan (and others) relating civilization, energy, and information. Let’s start of by discussing entropy (energy), thermodynamics and information. There are multiple links (thermodynamics species a minimum amount of energy usage required for computation). The first one we’re interested in here is due to MIT professor Claude Shannon. Prof. Shannon provided the mathematical foundations relating information, data science, and thermodynamics. Specifically, his mathematical formulation for information is identical to that of negative entropy. (Entropy, sometimes confused with the similar concept of energy or rather energy gradients, is the disorder in the universe. You can think of it as the useable energy available. We’ll come to the steam locomotives in the photo in a bit.)
There’s another relationship as well: it takes energy to perform computation, and there is a thermodynamic minimum on the amount of energy necessary for computation. (This is a non-trivial consideration for Google’s data centers.)
In addition to being famous for compression algorithms, Shannon also became wealthy later in life after he became an early investor in Qualcomm, which was co-founded by one of his students. He saw a connection between information and Wall Street (something we might explore in future posts).
A recurring theme we’ve looked at is using data to model the past and future. One fascinating application of models is to civilizations. We touched on mathematical models of past civilizations (and what they say about the future) when we discussed the singularity. We’ll have more to say in future blog posts.
This steam engine photo is one the coolest depictions of entropy in action. An understanding of thermodynamics helped improve its design.
Photo credit: Wikimedia/Tenderlok/CC-BY-SA-3
A version of this article original ran as a photo post on our Instagram feed.