The Maximum Entropy Method 1 ( Invited paper )

We have heard so far at this meeting from the practical-minded men of radio astronomy. Faced with the problem: ‘my map has sidelobes and noise on it’, they promptly reach for the nearest available weapons — ‘cleaners, polishers and kneaders’. All these use varying amounts of subjective human judgement, as for example in ‘window cleaning’. The ideas of the maximum entropy method are intriguing, since they suggest that one can in principle remove the effects of sidelobes from the map, reduce the apparent noise, and give extra resolution. But maximum entropy is not just another image reconstruction technique, it is a technique for the idealist; the man who cares what should be done with his data. It is more fundamental than other techniques and deals with problems in a very general way. What the maximum entropy method sets out to do is to seek the most likely answer to a particular question that can be obtained from a given body of scientific data.