ENTROPY AND INFORMATION THEORY IN BIOLOGICAL PHYSICS

The importance of bridging the worlds of biological physics, statistical mechanics and information theory cannot be understated. Science is increasingly becoming interdisciplinary and multifaceted in its approach and this book is an attempt at the formulation of a comprehensive resource on entropic and information theoretic perspectives on biological physics.

Since the nineteenth century, there has been an evolving scientific journey on the subject of entropy around the world. In the twentieth century, with the works of the likes of Shannon, Brillouin and Bennett, the entropic framework took a turn towards transcending the thermodynamic origins it had, to be able to account for and describe the nuances and dynamics of information. Biology happens to be an interesting avenue for the application of entropic and information-theoretic conceptual tools. The biological world gives us a trove of computational primitives and processes, from nucleotides to neural networks, from cellular computation to ecological information processing. Even as this is explored at length in this book, the more foundational question of how to undertake the fundamental conceptualization of biological processes in terms of information theory and entropic dynamics is addressed over multiple chapters.

This book is intended for the specialists in the field as well as common readers, alike. While there are enough points of interest for someone to begin their journey exploring this field, there is also sufficient conceptual rigour, supplemented with references, for advanced readers to appreciate the idiosyncrasies of this area of science. This book came out of lectures I gave as part of the Biophysics course at the Department of Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Delhi in 2021.  I would like to acknowledge Prof. Sanjay Jain (Delhi University) for his support and encouragement during the formulation of my lectures which form the basis of this accessible introduction to the world of entropy and information theory in biological physics.