On Monday at a little past eleven, I will officially begin my life as a graduate student. Some dozen years removed from any direct contact with coursework, this moment feels like the start of a Survivor reality season — having dumped me in the ocean, the boat sails away as I wade to shore. Waiting for me on the island are a cast of younger peers and smarter professors, ready to test my mettle with a plate full of grubs.
There will be ample time to dwell on the fear, uncertainty and hopes for the coming years. Before those paths can be explored, however, I feel compelled to first mark my initial position with a discussion of information. Perhaps when the boat returns to take me home, I’ll be able to measure my growth.
Like the textbook nightmare for any student, I was asked to do homework before I arrived. The assignment came in the form of a book by physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer, “Information: The New Language of Science.” My own days of a physicist are more than a decade behind me, but I had a leg up on my computer science, business and humanities peers in making sense of the dense material. Some of the chapters covered ideas conceived after I graduated in 1990, but the bulk of it awakened dormant brain cells.
Von Baeyer adeptly navigates the history of science and those who sculpted the theories and formulas in use today. He follows the succession of key physicists and philosophers, discusses the gist of significant experimentation, and returns to both to illustrate ideas presented later in the book. The author spends some time early trying to define information, but dwells primarily on concepts the provide the dots without making all of the connections. That becomes my task after the final chapter is read.
Before this assignment, I considered information to be an absolute. How much we know depends on how well we retrieve and analyze data, but any fuzziness is due to inexperience rather than some maleable property of this absolute truth. Faith in the immutable drove me to physics and a very reductionist view of science. Know the parts, know the whole. One day, the elusive solution to a deterministic universe would be an elegant all-encompassing equation.
This is not what I believe now.
Information is the arrangement of data. Knowledge is the meaningful arrangement of data. Data is evidence of existence. These definitions, conceived after digesting the von Baeyer work, will serve as the foundation for my studies, to be revisited again and again as I work toward my degree. I will seek to determine what makes something “meaningful” and learn more about the tools and processes for pulling information from the ether.
The mind-blowing revelation, though, is the challenge to my preconception about an absolute truth. Through a detailed examination of quantum theory, von Baeyer leads us to the building blocks of information: bits and qubits.
A bit is the smallest unit of data. It is the total amount of information contained in an elementary system, according to Anton Zeilinger. Yes or No. One or Zero. Up or Down. A bit is concrete and simple.
A qubit, on the other hand, is all possible states at once. It is counter-intuitive, a superposition of all concrete bits that could arise. A qubit is a truth that can never be known without destroying it. The moment an observer interacts with a qubit, the possibilities reduce to a single state — a bit. Until that happens and data is created, truth is a constantly changing picture no one can ever know. Therefore, truth is not absolute. Truth is created.
It will take a long while to wrap my head completely around that idea. Acceptance of it, however, offers some interesting paths to explore on this island of Informatics. My focus shifts from finding the right answer to discovering what could make a solution right.