What is "information"?

>>9097038
Show an instance of a scientist "talking about information". They wouldn't, they would specify what the fuck they were talking about otherwise be labelled as useless hacks.

Like most words, "information" is vague and contextual. I can use it to refer to data as it would be conceptualised in an OS, use it to refer to some divisible component in DNA, I use it to refer to strings of text.

This is a shit thread, stop.

>>9097056
I think you're wrong. Take for example the "information" paradox of blackholes. If this term was solely used by hacks then persons such as Einstein and Hawking wouldn't waste their time talking about it.

Information is one of those concepts that has fallen into the mystical realm of popular science. It literally just means how many bits (or other units depends on the base of your log) it takes to encode a message.

>>9097064
Not that guy, but he's right that its really just a meaningless buzzword unless you are specifying context like what you did.

We don't even know what the OP means

>>9097070
Well I am OP and I just specified the use. In this case it's information paradox. Information can't be lost. That kind of information. What is it, exactly?

>>9097038
http://4chan-science.wikia.com/wiki/Computer_Science_and_Engineering#Information_Theory_and_Coding_Theory

It will completely change the way you view the world

>>9097073
bumb for this

>>9097038
What's she saying?

>>9097064
>>9097073
In Hawking's case he is probably talking about light. In his popsci book, A Brief History of Time, he gives various arguments about "the information contents" of black holes. In his actual work, he probably instead uses the more commonly understood term entropy to rigorously describe some paradoxes (violations of thermodynamics) in some models of black holes. No clue about Einstein, he's so full of false quotes anyway so why bother.

I believe the more common usage of the term in sciences concerns the amount of samples taken from a random variable. Just to make it all more complicated, the information of a single sample is equal to the entropy of the random variable, which here means randomness. These anons are talking about this definition:
>>9097066
>>9097078