In the Beginning was Information

uncertainties is always greater than a specific natural constant,which would have been impossible if the uncertainties were vanishinglysmall. It follows for example that certain measurementscan never be absolutely exact. This finding resulted in the collapseof the structure of the then current nineteenth century deterministicphilosophy. The affirmations of the laws of nature are so powerfulthat viewpoints which were held up to the time they are formulated,may be rapidly discarded.Information theorems: In conclusion we mention that there is aseries of theorems which should also be regarded as laws of nature,although they are not of a physical or a chemical nature. Theselaws will be discussed fully in this book, and all the previouslymentioned criteria N1 to N9 as well as the relevance statements R1to R6, are also valid in their case.2.6 Possible and Impossible EventsThe totality of all imaginable events and processes can be dividedinto two groups as in Figure 7, namelya) possible eventsb) impossible events.Possible events occur under the “supervision” of the laws ofnature, but it is in general not possible to describe all of them completely.On the other hand, impossible events could be identified bymeans of the so-called impossibility theorems.Impossible events can be divided into two groups, those which are“fundamentally impossible”, and those which are “statisticallyimpossible”. Events which contradict for example the energy law,are impossible in principle, because this theorem even holds forindividual atoms. On the other hand, radio-active decay is a statisticallaw which is subject to the probability theorems, and cannotbe applied to individual atoms. But in all practical cases the numberof atoms is so immense that an “exact” formulation can beused, namely n(t) = n 0 x e -k x t . The decay constant k does notdepend on temperature, nor on pressure, nor on any possible chem-40