Order and Disorder (The Story of Information) – Screening Followed by Q& A Session
We are surrounded by order and entropy. Over the last 300 years we have developed amazing new ways to take advantage and harness energy and we have used this ability to transform our environment. This however is simply one type of visible order that we have created on planet Earth, there is another type of invisible order. Something that we are only now truly understanding the complexity of but one that nature has been harnessing for billions years, something we call information.
In this documentary Professor Jim Al-Khalili investigates one of the most important concepts in the world today – information. He discovers how we harnessed the power of symbols, everything from the first alphabet to the electric telegraph through to the modern digital age. But on this journey he learns that information isn’t just about human communication, it’s woven very profoundly into the fabric of reality.
This film reveals how the concepts of information and entropy are intimately linked. The featured engineers and scientists (Leibniz, Carnot, Clausius, Jaquard, Morse, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Turing and Shannon) were the men who, by figuring out how to reduce information to a simple code (whether a card that directed a silk loom to weave patterns, Morse’s telegraph code, or Turing’s computational algorithms) laid the basis for almost boundless information processing and communication where, in the 21st century, anything (sounds, pictures, texts etc ) can be stored in universal bits.
Starting with Mesopotamian pictograms and progressing through Jaquard’s programmable punch-card loom to Morse’s code and the birth of the computer era, Al-Khalili shows how seeing everything as a series of ones and zeroes has propelled civilisation forward.
The screening will be followed by Q& A Session.
- Muhammad Siddiqui (Tech Entrepreneur, MS in AI)
- Dr. Amjad Sohail (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, National University of Medical Sciences)
- Dr. Naqeeb ur Rehman (Mathematician, Admin: OpenMathCircle)
This session is free and open to all. Just visit the venue to attend it.
The Black Hole
Plot 5H, Street 100, G-11/3, Islamabad.
Click here for Google Maps Location
