Birth of the BIT

 

How the Bit Was Born: Claude Shannon and the Invention of Information
“Information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle … transforming every branch of knowledge.”
By Maria Popova

“All things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe… Observer-participancy gives rise to information,” the pioneering theoretical physicist John Wheeler asserted in his visionary It for Bit concept in 1989. But what exactly is the bit, this elemental unit of participatory sensemaking, and how did it come to permeate our consciousness?

That’s what James Gleick examines in a portion of The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (public library) — his now-classic chronicle of how technology and human thought co-evolved, which remains one of the finest, sharpest books written in our century, full of ideas fertilized by the genius of a singular seer and incubated in the nest of time and culture into ever-growing prescience.

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