From the behaviour of enemy planes to the knowledge of modelling: the scientific and technical notion of information

In the context of World War II, scientists worked on prediction theory. Planes flew twice as fast and twice as high. The coordination between radar devices and anti-aircraft guns had to be automated. Information became identified as an entity which could describe this coupling. The connection was made with other definitions of information dating from the 1920s in scientific as well as technical domains (namely physics and statistics on the one hand, telecommunications on the other). After the war, in the late 1940s, a so-called “information theory” was born. This theory has been applied to gain a better understanding of the human mind and, the way it treats knowledge among other things.