Observations on Method in Moral Science: Being an Essay of Criticism and Suggestion Book

Seife gives the reader a sense of how looking through the lens of information theory can help in understanding some of the questions of current science, particularly modern physics and cosmology.

In the early part of the book he relates it to entropy, and not just the common way we think of entropy, that is, things going toward chaos, but to the another more specific underlying principle of entropy dealing with thermodynamics. You don't have to be a science type to read this book, but on the other hand, I was glad I already knew a bit about most of what he was writing about. Being familiar with some terminology and concepts made this a fun read. And, I liked that there were some things I'd read about before that he was able to define very succinctly.

He says that information is a fundamental property of the physical world, just like mass or energy. Apparently the math and various experiments show that as well. Thus, one can use this conceptual lens to look at questions that seem hard to solve.

It could be my own shortcoming, but one question I've never been able to answer is whether information has a subjective aspect to it. That is, we define something as information because we can perceive it, either with our senses or with our instruments or by somebody's math. But, does this bring us any closer to understanding the underlying reality of things than any other conceptual framework we come up with? I guess time will tell.

Meanwhile, this is a fun book to read if you want a new way of looking at some things in modern science like black holes, Schrodinger's cat, and other things.