Tom Stonier
Tom "Ted" Stonier (29 April 1927 – 15 June 1999)[1] was a German biologist, philosopher, information theorist, educator and pacifist. His scientific studies centered on information provide a plausible explanation to the evolutionist concepts of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He drafts the principle of the transformation of a primordial energetic soup (big bang) towards a pure informational state (Chardin's Omega Point). He places the current material world in this entropic, dynamical evolution of the energy-matter-information equilibrium.
Stonier was born in Hamburg to a French mother and German-Jewish father, and fled with his family to New York in 1939.[1] He studied biology at Drew University and received his PhD from Yale University in 1955.[1] He began his academic career at Rockefeller University.[1]
Stonier taught biology at Manhattan College from 1962.[1] His book Nuclear Disaster, a study of the effects of a hypothetical nuclear strike on New York City, was published in 1964.[1] He was appointed to a position as a visiting professor in the University of Bradford's Department of Peace Studies by Professor Adam Curle soon after the Department's founding in 1973.[2] Stonier would later become head of Bradford's School of Science and Society, another new department.[2] In the 1970s he also campaigned for the increased use of computers in the classroom.[1]
In 1985 he co-founded, with Dave Catlin, Valiant Technology, a London-based company which designed LOGO Programming Language based Turtle robots the Valiant Turtle and the Roamer educational robot.
Books[]
- Nuclear Disaster (1964)
- The Wealth of Information: A Profile of the Post-Industrial Economy (1983)
- Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe (1990)
- Beyond Information: The Natural History of Intelligence (1992)
- Information and Meaning: An Evolutionary Perspective (1997)
See also[]
References[]
- ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g Goodman, Geoffrey (28 June 1999). "Tom Stonier: A man of computers and peace". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 February 2021.
- ^ Jump up to: a b McKinlay, Robert A. (1991). "From Harvard to Bradford". In Woodhouse, Tom (ed.). Peacemaking in a Troubled World. Berg. pp. 65–6.
- 20th-century German biologists
- 20th-century German philosophers
- German information theorists
- 1927 births
- 1999 deaths
- German male writers
- Academics of the University of Bradford
- Manhattan College faculty
- Peace and conflict scholars
- Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States
- Drew University alumni
- Yale University alumni
- German biologist stubs
- German philosopher stubs