Re:Has Physics Gotten Something Really Important Really Wrong?
by Retric on Saturday July 09, 2016 @10:44PM
(#12064338)
If you consider morse code was 100 years old at that point, there had already been a lot of very practical work under that heading. With earlier effort focused on designing and cracking encryption systems.
Shannon was more an outgrowth of having already abstracted information and looking for ways to encode that for transmission. I don't want to downplay the value, but in historical context it's very different from how you learn about such things after the fact.
When I talk about information theory, I'm talking more about the more generalized forms of it (Shannon, etc), not necessarily something that could generally be described as 'information' in a more classical definition. Specifically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematical_Theory_of_Commu....
(this is a subject I'm actively learning over time, so please correct me if I'm wrong!)