The role of information theory in chemistry
Is chemistry an information science after all?
When a concept starts cropping up in science everywhere you look, you have to suspect that it is either very profound or very trivial. As far as information theory is concerned, I’m still putting my money on the former.
No sooner had Claude Shannon introduced information theory to communications technology in the 1940s than it popped up in molecular biology, at the heart of the digital code of DNA. Soon after, while computer science seized on ideas by the likes of John von Neumann and Alan Turing to manipulate strings of bits, physicist John Wheeler began to think of physical law in informational terms. Thanks to his work and that of others, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics are among the areas of physics being formulated as information theories.