Werner Gitt

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Werner Gitt 2018

Werner Gitt (born February 22, 1937 in Uschdeggen , Stallupönen district , East Prussia ) is a book author and one of the better-known representatives of creationism in Germany . Before his retirement in 2002 he was director of the information technology department of the department for scientific-technical cross-sectional tasks within the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Braunschweig .

Life

Werner Gitt was born in 1937 in Uschdeggen (from 1938 Raineck), a small village in northeastern East Prussia. After the invasion of the Red Army in January 1945, his older brother Fritz was abducted by the Russians during the refugee trek to the west, and shortly afterwards his mother to the Ukraine, where she died a little later. When he was expelled from the Poles, Werner Gitt came to West Germany. After his father returned from French captivity, he moved with him first to the Lüchow area and later to Westphalia .

From 1963 to 1968, Gitt completed an engineering degree at the Technical University of Hanover , from which he graduated as a graduate engineer. He then worked as an assistant at the Institute for Control Engineering at the Technical University of Aachen . Here he received his doctorate in 1971 as a Dr.-Ing. From 1971 he was head of the information technology department at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Braunschweig, where he was appointed director and professor in 1978 . In this position, he went in 2002 to retire .

He has been married to his wife Marion since 1966 and has two children. During an evangelistic meeting in Brunswick experienced Gitt and his wife conversion . Since then, the couple has been part of the Braunschweiger Friedenskirche, an Evangelical Free Church Baptist Congregation . Werner Gitt is also a member of the Study Group Word and Knowledge and appears as a speaker at evangelism throughout Germany. He has authored numerous books. Recordings of his lectures are distributed and some are also available online.

Statements about information

Measure for comparing high storage densities

In 1997, Gitt proposed a “new measure for comparing high storage densities ” , which he calls the “information density index” (symbol: q ). He estimates the maximum information density of the DNA molecule in living cells to be 1.9 × 10 18 bits / mm 3 ; q should be the quotient of the available information density and that of the DNA. In technical implementations, this quotient is always less than 1, estimated at around 5 × 10 −13 for the 256 megabit memory that was current at the time .

“This small value indicates that modern computer technology is still a long way from the storage density in nature. However, since the key figure described is based on the maximum value, there is enough leeway for all future technologies so that 0 < q <1 is always guaranteed. The measure presented allows the degree of integration of any other storage media to be compared. "

In August 2012, biologists working with Harvard Professor George Church published a technique with which they could save and read out a 300-page non-fiction book in DNA. A value of q = 1 was thus achieved. According to the article, messages were saved on DNA with a quotient of q = 1 as early as 1988, but at that time with a significantly shorter length of the saved message.

Conception of information

For Gitt, information is the third fundamental variable of all technical and biological processes, alongside matter and energy . However , according to Gitt, Shannon's information theory must not be applied to the field of biology , as this only covers the statistical level. Accordingly, Gitt sees no generation of information in statistical processes (random subsidence ).

According to Gitt, the "Natural Laws on Information" (NGI) are:

  1. A material quantity cannot produce a non-material quantity.
  2. Information is a non-material quantity.
  3. In statistical processes (= operations without controlling intelligence) no information can arise.
  4. Information can only arise through an intelligent transmitter. Note on this: An intelligent transmitter is conscious, equipped with its own will, is creative, thinks independently and is goal-oriented.

For Gitt to fully characterize this information, the following five aspects are necessary:

  • There must be symbols for material representation ( letters , magnetizations on a hard drive , DNA base pairs, sound spectrum). This level of information transfer is called statistics .
  • The characters are arranged according to certain syntactic rules of a grammar .
  • From the syntactic structure can be described by a code , the semantics of the message open. If the code is not known, the NCI do not allow a statement. The coded characters on the information carrier must be representative: for example, “GGA” in the gene code system stands for a glycine molecule.
  • The information must include a pragmatic aspect. The sender of the information has an intention which, if necessary, is intended to cause an action in the recipient. An HTTP request to a server obviously has a sender-side pragmatics; In the case of the genetic code, at least one recipient-side pragmatics can be observed, because it causes the synthesis of proteins in living cells .
  • Gitt calls the fifth necessary aspect apobetics (from the Greek αποβαίνοντα: results, success). He means the purpose of the message intended by the sender or the purpose achieved by the recipient.

According to his conclusions, every piece of information must have an originator or sender who defines the associated code and meaning. However, he emphasizes that his NGI are falsifiable if one could specify a process in which information that meets all five requirements but has no transmitter, for example, arises from chance. He does not count biological information among the fully known examples, since its creation is neither empirically accessible nor has it been able to be reproduced so far. Because according to the NGI every information and every code system can be traced back to an originator equipped with creative intelligence (in the fully known examples these are humans) and the genetic code lies within the definition range of the NGI, humans must also have an originator. Werner Gitt identifies this author according to his personal conviction as the God of the Bible .

criticism

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The following objections are raised:

  • Bioinformaticians have already been able to show that information that represents artificial life can arise from random processes.
  • According to Gitt's understanding of information, there is no information in purely statistical processes. The problem is that one cannot judge which systems are random in nature and which are not. Gitt's answer that this can only be judged on the basis of reliable meta information (= information about other system data) does not meet the scientific criteria.
  • In his view of information, sentences can only be drawn up “on the basis of experience”, which should also apply to information not produced by humans. According to the critics, the sentence “Information can only be generated by an intelligent transmitter” cannot be generalized to all information from a purely scientific point of view.
  • Furthermore, considerations from the field of information theory cannot be transferred to a scientific field without further adaptation. In information theory, systems contain a teleological component, whereas in scientific disciplines "objective reality" is described independently of humans. Under genetic code a set of rules is to be understood that purely physico-chemical processes describe, through which are transmitted in protein structures DNA structures, while standing in information theory arrangements of conscious being on the use of symbols for the exchange of messages in the foreground .

Evangelistic non-fiction books

A major concern of Werner Gitt is evangelism, through lectures and through books. These were mainly published by CLV and Hänssler Verlag and are widely distributed. The book Questions That Are Asked Again and Again was published in 2005 in its 20th edition; translations into a total of 17 languages ​​are also given.

Gitt covers a large number of subjects in these books. To what extent he has the necessary competence for this is controversial; several passages from his books are used as illustrative examples in Reading Christian Books critically . Gitt's argument with predictions from the Bible that came true met with numerous objections.

Fonts (selection)

General

  • Determination of parameters on linear controlled systems with the help of characteristic value loci for system responses of deterministic test signals . Dissertation at Aachen University of Technology 1970.
  • with Arnd Koch: Criteria for evaluating a mainframe computer system in the technical-scientific field during the planning phase (= PTB report: ATWD; 9). Braunschweig 1977.
  • New measure for comparing high storage densities . In: Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt Annual Report 1997, p. 307, ISSN  0340-4366 .

Christian

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Werner Gitt: That's how it's written , CLV, 7th edition, 2008 ( PDF ), p. 221f.
  2. ↑ Scientist and evangelist Werner Gitt turns 80 , Idea , message from February 16, 2017.
  3. ↑ New measure for comparing high storage densities. In: Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt Annual Report 1997, p. 307, ISSN  0340-4366 .
  4. ↑ G. M. Church, Y. Gao, S. Kosuri: Next-Generation Digital Information Storage in DNA. In: Science. 337, 2012, p. 1628, doi : 10.1126 / science.1226355 .
  5. ↑ Davis, Joe. "Microvenus." Art Journal, vol. 55, no. 1, 1996, pp. 70-74. JSTOR 777811 (English).
  6. ↑ Werner Gitt: Did God create through evolution? 6th edition. Hänssler, 1988, ISBN 3-7751-1391-6 (therein on page 144).
  7. ↑ a b Werner Gitt: Refutation of evolution through natural laws , Bruderhand-Medien , Wienhausen 2016, 3rd edition (PDF; 1.72 MB).
  8. ↑ Werner Gitt: In the beginning there was information .
  9. ↑ Tim J. Hutton: Evolvable Self-Replicating Molecules in an Artificial Chemistry . In: Artificial Life . tape 8 , no. 4 , 2002, p. 341-356 , doi : 10.1162 / 106454602321202417 .
  10. ^ Franz Graf-Stuhlhofer : Read Christian books critically. A textbook and workbook for training your own judgment based on excerpts from conservative Protestant non-fiction books. Publishing House for Culture and Science, Bonn 2008; on Gitt's books pp. 25–34, 52, 54, 60, 62, 79f.
  11. ↑ Klaus Schmeh: Do prophecies that have come true prove that the Bible is the word of God? Telepolis 2006.
personal data
SURNAME Gitt, Werner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German graduate engineer for control engineering and information technology, representative of creationism
DATE OF BIRTH February 22, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Uschdeggen , Stallupönen district, East Prussia