>> But my understanding is that Shannon was inspired by the thermodynamic entropy in inventing information theory The rest of this comment is from Wikipedia[0]

>> But my understanding is that Shannon was inspired by the thermodynamic entropy in inventing information theory The rest of this comment is from Wikipedia[0] During their discussions, regarding what Shannon should call the "measure of uncertainty" or attenuation in phone-line signals with reference to his new information theory, according to one source: “My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it ‘information’, but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it ‘uncertainty’. When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, ‘You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.” [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_entropy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_entropy