Science from Fisher Information
A Unification

The second edition of the hugely successful Physics from Fisher Information.

B. Roy Frieden (Author)

9780521810791, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 June 2004

504 pages, 32 b/w illus. 5 tables
24.4 x 17 x 2.7 cm, 1 kg

'This is a delightful and very well written postgraduate level text, which should be of interest to a wide audience including physicists and philosophers. It is a landmark book whose ideas will be discussed and hopefully will be further developed in the future, as it provides a brand new framework to interpret the laws of nature.' Contemporary Physics

This book develops and applies an analytical approach to deriving the probability laws of science in general. It is called 'extreme physical information' or EPI. EPI is an expression of the imperfection of observation: Owing to random interaction of a subject with its observer and other possible disturbances, its measurement contains less Fisher information than does the subject per se. Moreover, the information loss is an extreme value. An EPI output may alternatively be viewed as the payoff of a zero-sum game of information acquisition between the observer and a 'demon' in subject space. EPI derives, Escher-like, the very probability law that gave rise to the measurement. In applications, EPI is used to derive both existing and new analytical relations governing probability laws of physics, genetics, cancer growth, ecology and economics. This unified approach will be fascinating to students and those who seek a new mathematical tool of research.

Introduction
1. What is Fisher information?
2. Fisher information in a vector world
3. Extreme physical information
4. Derivation of relativistic quantum mechanics
5. Classical electrodynamics
6. The Einstein field equation of general relativity
7. Classical statistical physics
8. Power spectral 1/f noise
9. Physical constants and the 1/x probability law
10. Constrained-likelihood quantum measurement theory
11. Research topics
12. EPI and entangled realities: the EPR-Bohm experiment
13. Econophysics
14. Growth and transport processes
15. Cancer growth.

Subject Areas: Physics [PH]