EventsDIGITALISATION FOR A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY
Published
This submission belongs to the session Conference FIS 2017. The Seventh International Conference on the Foundations of Information Science of the event DIGITALISATION FOR A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY
Published date
08 Jun, 2017
Citation
John Donald Collier, What we can discover from Dimensional Analysis of the information concept, in Proceedings of DIGITALISATION FOR A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY, Gothenburg, 12 June–16 June 2017, MDPI: Basel, Switzerland, doi: 10.3390/IS4SI-2017-03931
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What we can discover from Dimensional Analysis of the information concept

1. University of KwaZulu-Natal
Abstract

Dimensional analysis is a technique used by scientists and engineers to check the rationality of their calculations, but it can also be used to determine the nature of the quantities used. Information is usually measured in bits, or binary digits, but it could be measured using any other base. I will be arguing that, given the possibility of an objective measure of information in terms of asymmetries, and the relation of information to order, Schrὂdinger’s suggestion that negentropy was an appropriate measure should be taken seriously. After clarifying this notion, I use dimensional analysis to show that negentropy has units of degrees of freedom, and that this is a sensible unit of information.

Keywords
information
dimensional analysis
entropy
negentropy
order
disorder
degrees of freedom
Manuscript
Structural Realism, Structural Information, and the General Concept of Structure
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