As Mr Vedral points out, it says that an unexpected, infrequent event contains much more information than a more regular happening.

ECONOMIST: Information theory

One quibble: Mr Vedral often digresses from the point at hand, so the overall effect tends to be a bit meandering.

ECONOMIST: Information theory

Unusually for a physicist, Mr Vedral spends a fair bit of time talking about religious views, such as how God created the universe.

ECONOMIST: Information theory

Once he has defined information, Mr Vedral proceeds to show how information theory can be applied to biology, physics, economics, sociology and philosophy.

ECONOMIST: Information theory

Mr Vedral's professional interests lie in quantum computing and quantum information science, which use the laws of quantum mechanics respectively to build powerful computers and render codes unbreakable.

ECONOMIST: Information theory

Now Vlatko Vedral, an Oxford physicist, examines the claim that bits of information are the universe's basic units, and the universe as a whole is a giant quantum computer.

ECONOMIST: Information theory

Mr Vedral gives a good description of how Shannon's information theory can be applied to winning at blackjack or in buying shares (Shannon and his friends made fortunes in Las Vegas as well as on the stockmarket).

ECONOMIST: Information theory

This led him to calculate that the information content of any event was proportional to the logarithm of its inverse probability of occurrence. (Unlike many popular-science books that eschew equations, Mr Vedral includes a couple and tries his best to explain them to the reader.) What does the equation mean?

ECONOMIST: Information theory