This led him to calculate that the information content of any event was proportional to the logarithm of its inverse probability of occurrence. (Unlike many popular-science books that eschew equations, Mr Vedral includes a couple and tries his best to explain them to the reader.) What does the equation mean?

ECONOMIST: Information theory

Economists such as Mitchell Polinsky, of Stanford Law School, and Steven Shavell, of Harvard Law School, argue that to deter harmful conduct, punitive damages should be equivalent to the amount of harm caused, multiplied by the inverse of the probability of detection.

ECONOMIST: Punitive damages