Re^4: Random Math Question

[BrowserUk]

Thanks. For your amusement, I came across this paragraph whilst looking around for further reading on entropy (my emphasis):

Another major source of confusion about entropy change as the result of simply rearranging macro objects comes from information theory "entropy".2 Claude E. Shannon's 1948 paper began the era of quantification of information and in it he adopted the word "entropy" to name the quantity that his equation defined 2. This occurred because a friend, the brilliant mathematician John von Neumann, told him "call it entropy no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage" 3. Wryly funny for that moment, Shannon's unwise acquiescence has produced enormous scientific confusion due to the increasingly widespread usefulness of his equation and its fertile mathematical variations in many fields other than communications 4, 5.