Biochemistry is an interesting field, (partly because I cannot graduate without me being interested in it), and in the course of my reading Lehninger's PRINCIPLES OF BIOCHEMISTRY Fourth Edition by David L. Nelson and Michael M. Fox, I encountered a passage that immediately made me correlate my neural traffic with the level of agitation I have in my mind.
The following short passage from Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene III, is spoken by Brutus, when he realizes that he must face Mark Antony's army. It is an information-rich non-random arrangement of 125 letters of the English alphabet:
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries
In addtion to what this passage says overtly, it has many hidden meanings. It not only reflects a complex sequence of events in the play, it also echoes the play's ideas on conflict, ambition and the demands of leadership. Permeated with Shakespeare's understanding of human nature, it is very rich in information.
However, if the 125 letters making up this quotation were allowed to fall into a completely non-random, chaotic pattern, as shown in the following box, they will have no meaning whatsoever.
In this form, the 125 letters contain little or no information, but they are very rich in entropy. Such considerations have led to the conclusion that information is a form of energy; information has been called "negative entropy." In fact, the branch of mathematics, called Information Theory, which is basic to the programming logic of computers, is closely related to thermodynamic theory. Living organisms are highly ordered, nonrandom structures, immensely rich in information and entropy-poor.
Hah. Not humans. Some humans are so much uninformed that they create so much havoc. That's why on most occasions, the more informed a person becomes, the more peace of mind he gets. With information comes order. Hear that.
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