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Article ID: CBB319733452

Under Shannon’s Bandwagon. Rethinking the Reception of Information Theory in Thermal Physics, 1948-1957 (2023)

HOST: Journal of History of Science and Technology
Volume: 17
Issue: 1
Pages: 17-38
Publication date: 2023
Language: English

URI: https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/host-2023-0003

DOI: 10.2478/host-2023-0003

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Information theory Information science Physics 20th century, late Weaver, Warren Shannon, Claude Elwood Von Neumann, John

In this paper I analyze the historical case of how Shannon’s theory of information, among other alternative theories, began to be applied rapidly and systematically within thermal physics in the 1950s. After evaluating this theory and the intellectual context in which it is inserted, I argue that it was not the formal-conceptual features of Shannon’s theory but the particular motivations of influential scientists such as von Neumann, Weaver and Wiener that properly made it possible for information science to become deeply rooted in thermal physics during the 1950s, as shown by the proposals of Brillouin and Jaynes.

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