some very fundamental ideas in twin fields where there is still room for controversy over basic principles. These ideas may well appear far from elementary to the reader making a first acquaintance with probability and information theory. Some prior knowledge of the technicalities of these theories and a familiarity with thermodynamical terms are essential.
Viewed overall the book is a somewhat contrived amalgamation of seven loosely connected essays each discussing an assortment of concepts and assumptions. These essays challenge some very widely held ideas and provoke the reader into an examination of his own. Chapter 1 (12 pages) is concerned primarily with random event probability but touches on the philosophy of Vico (verum ipsum factum), extra sensory perception, the mechanics of generating random sequences as well as Chebyshev's lemma and a proof of Bernouilli's theorem. Chapter 2 begins with the urn sampling problem and treats information theory as a simple extension of combinatorial analysis so that information potential is defined as the logarithm of the number of distinguishable messages. I t continues with a proof of Stirling's approximation, error correcting codes, Hamming distances and redundancy, and ends with the provocative thesis that there cannot be a mathematical theory of information but only of the capacity of the information channel. Information cannot be treated as some sort of substance which is operated upon, because of its very indeterminacy. And so the author proceeds with remarkable economy of space to deal in later chapters with matters such as communication and noise, Bayes procedures and inference, sampling theory, therapeutic trials and finally to the relationship between information potential and thermodynamic entropy.
This small book is for serious study rather than for general reading. Unfortunately misprints and omissions abound and the choice of symbols is at times confusing. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the stimulating exercise of following Dr. Wrighton's well reasoned arguments and can unhesitatingly recommend the book to any forensic scientist with an interest in the topics outlined.