Can there be a science of information?

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Abstract
For those who want our discipline to be based on rigorous scientific foundations, this is confusing and disquieting. Information is a powerful metaphor, often compared with a fluid that can flow, have a source, and be extracted, transferred, acquired, and contained; data, symbols, signals, and messages are carriers of the fluid, Suppose that information is only a metaphor? Suppose that it has no measurable existence? Might it be to us what ether was to physicists in the last century? In the 1830s, Michael Faraday and others studying electricity and magnetism postulated “ether” as the medium through which electrical and magnetic action propagated. But every attempt to measure the speed of the earth’s passage through the ether—culminating with the famous Michelson–Morley experiment in 1887—detected nothing. In 1905, Einstein explained these baffling findings by proposing that the long-discussed ether did not exist, and did not need to because light travels at a fixed speed independent of the frame of reference. Einstein’s removal of the ether became part of the foundation of modern physics [Burke 1988]. In like manner, information as a measurable quantity does not appear to be needed to design computers and software.

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