Astronomy is generally regarded as the oldest field of natural science. Human interest in the affairs of heavenly bodies began in time immemorial, and the hereto earliest discovered astronomical records date back some 5,000 years. In the present age, we’ve become comfortable with notions like supernovae, satellite galaxies, time dilation, gravitational lensing; a great many concepts that would have seemed outlandish and scarcely intelligible just a few centuries ago. The theoretical and technological advancements that brought us to this degree of understanding of the universe beyond our clouds span countless disciplines and scales. In our comfort with these many notions, it’s easy to forget that their validation (and otherwise) has all depended on information carried across the universe by (until only recently) one tiny messenger: the photon. Even on the darkest nights, we’re showered with light from countless sources, often after it has passed through various mediums and bounced between many materials. Our own bodies emit light in the infrared and gamma spectra. The noise is cacophonous. Nevertheless, we’ve engineered tools and techniques to extract ample information; sift the signals from oceans of noise, sufficient to confirm the extraordinary theories to which we’ve become accustomed.
Closer to home, neuroscientists work eagerly to unveil the mysteries of our own experience of existence. Some 100 billion neurons transform and transmit information around 5 to 50 times per second across some 100 trillion connections in each and every human brain. That you can read and understand these words is, itself, remarkable. Despite great complexity and present limitations in observation, we’ve managed to rive signals from noise; to see through the eyes of others. Consider this video showing decoded signals from a feline visual cortex compared to groundtruth.
We live in an era of unprecedented and ever-increasing information aggregation thanks to the engineering of fantastic collection and storage technologies. In the vast pool of data, the answers we seek—to whatever questions one can imagine—swim amidst the noise. The challenge that remains is to extract the former from the latter, and it is for this reason that I study the fields of data science and information theory.