Nat (unit)
The natural unit of information (symbol: nat), sometimes also nit or nepit, is a unit of information, based on natural logarithms and powers of "e", rather than the powers of 2 and base 2 logarithms, which define the shannon. This unit is also known by its unit symbol, the nat. One nat is the information content of an event when the probability of that event occurring is 1/"e". One nat is equal to  shannons ≈ 1.44 Sh or, equivalently,  hartleys ≈ 0.434 Hart. History. Boulton and Wallace used the term "nit" in conjunction with minimum message length, which  was subsequently changed by the minimum description length community to "nat" to avoid confusion with the nit used as a unit of luminance. Alan Turing used the "natural ban". Entropy. Shannon entropy (information entropy), being the expected value of the information of an event, is a quantity of the same type and with the same units as information. The International System of Units, by assigning the same units (joule per kelvin) both to heat capacity and to thermodynamic entropy implicitly treats information entropy as a quantity of dimension one, with . Physical systems of natural units that normalize the Boltzmann constant  to 1 are effectively measuring thermodynamic entropy in nats. When the Shannon entropy is written using a natural logarithm, formula_1 it is implicitly giving a number measured in nats.