Asymmetry: The Foundation of Information

This book gathers concepts of information across diverse fields -physics, electrical engineering and computational science - surveying current theories, discussing underlying notions of symmetry, and showing how the capacity of a system to distinguish itself relates to information. The author develops a formal methodology using group theory, leading to the application of Burnside's Lemma to count distinguishable states. This provides a tool to quantify complexity and information capacity in any physical system.

Scott Muller graduated from the University of Queensland in Chemical Engineering specialising in biotechnology. He worked in Australia and Italy in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. In 2004 he received his doctorate from the University of Newcastle (Australia) where he studied the foundations of information and conducted research into the nature of 'emergence'. Recently he has worked on automated reasoning and expert systems in the telecommunications industry. Scott is currently developing industrial, adaptive decision-making systems using evolutionary programming techniques.