Tom Stonier

Tom "Ted" Stonier (29 April 1927 – 15 June 1999)[1] was a German biologist, philosopher, information theorist, educator and pacifist. His scientific studies centered on information provide a plausible explanation to the evolutionist concepts of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He drafts the principle of the transformation of a primordial energetic soup (big bang) towards a pure informational state (Chardin's Omega Point). He places the current material world in this entropic, dynamical evolution of the energy-matter-information equilibrium.

Stonier was born in Hamburg to a French mother and German-Jewish father, and fled with his family to New York in 1939.[1] He studied biology at Drew University and received his PhD from Yale University in 1955.[1] He began his academic career at Rockefeller University.[1]

Stonier taught biology at Manhattan College from 1962.[1] His book Nuclear Disaster, a study of the effects of a hypothetical nuclear strike on New York City, was published in 1964.[1] He was appointed to a position as a visiting professor in the University of Bradford's Department of Peace Studies by Professor Adam Curle soon after the Department's founding in 1973.[2] Stonier would later become head of Bradford's School of Science and Society, another new department.[2] In the 1970s he also campaigned for the increased use of computers in the classroom.[1]

In 1985 he co-founded, with Dave Catlin, Valiant Technology, a London-based company which designed LOGO Programming Language based Turtle robots the Valiant Turtle and the Roamer educational robot.