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
edit- 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
editReferences
edit- ^ 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.
- ^ a b McKinlay, Robert A. (1991). "From Harvard to Bradford". In Woodhouse, Tom (ed.). Peacemaking in a Troubled World. Berg. pp. 65–6.
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