Science as Gee Whiz Stuff

The following interview of Vlatko Vedral, professor of quantum information science at Oxford University, is very unsatisfying to me. He comes across claiming that everything can be reduced to "information". That is an amazing, wide-reaching, a profound claim. You would think that to have the audacity to make that claim you would have nailed down pretty well all the details and have a rock solid, air tight case. But if you listen, he ends up saying something quite different: he admits that current science doesn't know. I applaud him for his honesty, but it immediately screams: this book has lots of promise but no real delivery, lots of 'theory' but no real facts and analysis that grounds the theory.



So why write the book? I haven't read it so my cynical side says "to pocket money from sales to people who want a peek at 'gee whiz' science".

I don't know. The guy has a position at Oxford. The book reviews include what look like very positive endorsements:

"Let Vedral guide you skillfully through the wonderland of modern physics - where nothing is as it seems. This is the finest treatment I have read of the weird interplay of quantum reality, information and probability."--Paul Davies, author of The Eerie Silence and The Goldilocks Enigma

"An engaging, non-technical exploration of what the new theory of quantum information and computation tells us about life, the universe, and everything."--David Deutsch, author of The Fabric of Reality

But can you trust these "reviewers"? Publishers put a lot of pressure on their stable of writers to say pleasant things about other writers in the stable. You will also find that a lot of the glowing blurbs on the back of a book "coincide" with a lot of favourable mentions of that reviewer by the author of the book under review. Curious.

I'm willing to consider reading this book, but my initial impression is that it is a lot of hand waving and not much real content. This guy has picked a topic that is far too speculative to provide a general reader with anything useful to "learn".

One thing that strikes me as quite odd about this book is that the index has many, many references to where Vedral writes something about Italo Calvino. What could Calvino, an Italian journalist (1923-1985) not a scientist, have to say that would be relevant to explaining how the whole world and all of reality reduces to quantum information? Sorry, I just don't buy that references to Calvino are critical to understanding quantum information. The references many be interesting because Calvino had an interesting life, but I don't see any scientific theory or theoretical argument that can be advanced with reference to Calvino.