Seth Lloyd has a new book out Programming the Universe : A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos 
…When Shannon showed his new formula for information to the mathematician John von Neumann and asked him what the quantity he had just defined should be called, von Neumann is said to have replied “H.”
“Why H?” asked Shannon.
“Because that’s what Boltzmann called it,” said von Neumann…
That crazy von Neumann.
well, this shows that even scientists of the stature of Von Neumann take certain things for granted and shows very simply that some things go as faith in science even be it a notation of a simple quantity.
Is it just a coincidence that you post this entry right after the post about vedic computing?
It is just a coincidence that I ran into the Quantum Computing vedic book right before I ran into Seth Lloyd’s book. But then again, I think either everything is coincidence or nothing is coincidence, no?
> I think either … or …
I think superposition of the two …
well, this shows that even scientists of the stature of Von Neumann take certain things for granted and shows very simply that some things go as faith in science even be it a notation of a simple quantity.
Um, that’s not what I get at all from the anecdote. I get out the anecdote that there is a relationship between the Shannon concept of information and the thermodynamic quantity of entanglement. Shannon didn’t know the thermodynamic interpretation, von Neumann immediately recognized it. This doesn’t mean Shannon’s result is any lest important: his interpretation is a unique step in the history of the theory of information.
Whoah, whoah! Dave writes:
“I get out the anecdote that there is a relationship between the Shannon concept of information and the thermodynamic quantity of entanglement. Shannon didn’t know the thermodynamic interpretation, von Neumann immediately recognized it.”
Isn’t that putting Descartes before the horse a little? Shannon and Boltzmann were both thinking about classical probabilities. Saying that Boltzmann’s entropy represents entanglement pretty much requires you enter the Church of The Larger Hilbert Space and recite “There are no proper mixtures” three times.
But, maybe I’m missing something (IANAHOS), or maybe there’s further explicatory detail in the book. Von Neumann was a pretty smart guy, so maybe he was already a member of COTLS…?
Brain malfunctioning: substitute “entropy” where “entanglement” should be in my last comment.
Are stars just the blinkenlights of the cosmic computer?
Why do you think they called it the Altair 8800?