- I dare you to try and read this sentence.

Pause the screen if you have to.

(playful music)

Did you get it?

If English is your first language,

you were probably able to figure it out pretty quickly.

So why were you able to read that,

and what's the point of vowels

if you can still read perfectly fine without them?

If texting is your main source of communication,

you probably know what I mean.

The reason we're able

to read the sentence at all is usually attributed

to psychology and our brains' super-cool power

to fill in the blanks.

But there's another reason,

and it has to do with English itself

or more specifically the amount

of information contained in the English language.

But what does that mean,

the amount of information contained in the English language?

Like, how do you even measure that?

I mean, if someone were to ask you

which of these contains more information,

a five-letter word or five coin flips,

how would you even begin to answer?

Well, Claude Shannon, a mathematician

who's often referred to as the father of information theory,

came up with the concept of information entropy.

You may have heard the word entropy before,

usually being used to describe a messy room

or ice cubes melting or a demon in a box.

In physics, entropy means the measure

of chaos or disorder in a system,

the lower the order, the higher the entropy.

The way we're going to use it in this video is related

but slightly different.

In information theory, entropy is the measure

of information in terms of uncertainty,