Back to the Origin: Addressing Physical Phenomena with Information-Theoretic Tools

Dear Colleagues,

Entropy was first formulated in the deeply physical context of thermodynamics. Thereupon, the seminal works by Boltzmann, Shannon and others disclosed the awesome link of the “physical” entropy with statistics and information, thus triggering the field of information theory and its application to a wide spectrum of “less physical” fields, from physiology and neuroscience to economy and social sciences.

The urge of tackling issues in these fields has then stimulated the elaboration of information measures like approximate entropy, sample entropy, transfer entropy, permutation entropy and higher-order multivariate measures, along with theoretical works aiming at providing a sound mathematical background to these tools. This process is far from being definitely established, thus making information theory still a thriving research field.

In an apparent contradiction, a more limited, though increasing, number of works are being devoted to addressing purely physical problems with information-theoretical methods, thus providing a complementary approach to more conventional and established analytical techniques.

This Special Issue is especially devoted to contributions addressing applications of information theory in physical systems and problems. Nevertheless, contributions concerning new methods as well as works addressing complexity and stemming from other research fields, from biomedical engineering and neuroscience to geophysics and climatology, in which both the physical aspect and the information-theoretical one are apparent, are also welcome.

Prof. Dr. Leonardo Ricci
Prof. Dr. Luca Faes
Dr. Ludovico Minati
Guest Editors

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