PHY 256A Physics of Information Lecture 1 - Overview (Full Lecture)

PHY 256A Physics of Information Lecture 1 - Overview (Full Lecture)

In this video:
0:00 Video begins
0:13 1 - Introduction and motivations
3:17 1a) The Industrial Age and the development of thermodynamics
7:05 1b) The Information Age and what?
9:31 1c) Information is not energy
16:55 1d) Deterministic chaos - Nature actively produces information
1e) What is randomness? Where does it come from?
22:05 1f) Pattern discovery
1g) Causality
25:06 1h) Logic of the course
31:38 1i) The Learning Channel
37:04 1j) Goals
38:21 1k) Applications
41:24 2 - Who are we
46:27 3 - Course Logistics
49:56 4 - Materials
51:05 5 - Software tools and program development
54:52 6 - Reading for next meeting
57:57 7 - Homework : Everyday unpredictability

Instructor:
Professor Jim Crutchfield (Physics and Complexity Sciences Center)

Complexity Sciences Center:

The course explores how nature's structure reflects how nature computes. It introduces intrinsic unpredictability (deterministic chaos) and the emergence of structure (self-organization) in natural complex systems. Using statistical mechanics, information theory, and computation theory, the course develops a systematic framework for analyzing processes in terms of their causal architecture. This is determined by answering three questions: (i) How much historical information does a process store? (ii) How is that information stored? And (iii) how is the stored information used to produce future behavior? The answers to these questions tell one how a system intrinsically computes.

The course introduces tools to describe and quantify randomness and structure. It shows how they are necessarily complementary and how they are intimately related to concepts from the theory of computation. A number of example complex systems—taken from physics, chemistry, and biology—are used to illustrate the phenomena and methods. The course also takes time to reflect on the intellectual history of these topics, which is quite rich and touches on many basic questions in fundamental physics and the sciences and technology generally. New topics this year include complex materials and computation in quantum systems. The course will bring students to the research frontier in nonlinear physics and complex systems.
Flipped format: Watch lectures and work through interactive labs and homeworks online. Scheduled course time is allocated to hands-on problem solving, discussions on lectures, and introduction to online labs.

Complex systems analyzed:
* Low-dimensional chaos and routes to chaos
* Complex stochastic processes and hidden Markov models
* Cellular automata
* Spin systems and networks
* Structured-disordered one-dimensional materials
* Quantum dynamical systems
* Thermodynamic Computing: Maxwellian demons and information engines