Shannon approached the great man with his idea of information-as-resolved-uncertainty—which would come to stand at the heart of his work—and with an unassuming question. What should he call this thing? Von Neumann answered at once: say that information reduces “entropy.” For one, it was a good, solid physics word. “And more importantly,” he went on, “no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.” Almost certainly, this conversation never happened. But great science tends to generate its own lore, and the story is almost coeval with Shannon’s paper.
