The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick

the Iliad and the Odyssey not only could have been but must have been composed and sung without benefit of writing. The meter, the formulaic redundancy, in effect the very poetry of the great works served first and foremost to aid memory. Its incantatory power made of the verse a time capsule, able to transmit a virtual encyclopedia of culture across generations.

Speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis. Logic descended from the written word, in Greece as well as India and China, where it developed independently. Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience. Logic takes its form in chains: sequences whose members connect one to another. Conclusions follow from premises. These require a degree of constancy. They have no power unless people can examine and evaluate them. In contrast, an oral narrative proceeds by accretion, the words passing by in a line of parade past the viewing stand, briefly present and then gone, interacting with one another via memory and association. There are no syllogisms in Homer.

“We know that formal logic is the invention of Greek culture after it had interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing,” Walter Ong says—it is true of India and China as well—“and so made a permanent part of its noetic resources the kind of thinking that alphabetic writing made possible.”

Logic implicates symbolism directly: things are members of classes; they possess qualities, which are abstracted and generalized. Oral people lacked the categories that become second nature even to illiterate individuals in literate cultures: for example, for geometrical shapes. Shown drawings of circles and squares, they named them as “plate, sieve, bucket, watch, or moon” and “mirror, door, house, apricot drying board.” They could not, or would not, accept logical syllogisms.

One way of framing McLuhan’s critique of print would be to say that print offers only a narrow channel of communication. The channel is linear and even fragmented. By contrast, speech—in the primal case, face-to-face human intercourse, alive with gesture and touch—engages all the senses, not just hearing.

“The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender’s mental state.”*

Like the printing press, the telegraph, and the telephone before it, the Internet is transforming the language simply by transmitting information differently. What makes cyberspace different from all previous information technologies is its intermixing of scales from the largest to the smallest without prejudice, broadcasting to the millions, narrowcasting to groups, instant messaging one to one.

He was going to kill Russell’s dream of a perfect logical system. He was going to show that the paradoxes were not excrescences; they were fundamental.

that our logical intuitions (i.e., intuitions concerning such notions as: truth, concept, being, class, etc.) are self-contradictory.”

Von Foerster, like Margaret Mead and others, felt uncomfortable with the notion of information without meaning. “I wanted to call the whole of what they called information theory signal theory,” he said later, “because information was not yet there. There were ‘beep beeps’ but that was all, no information. The moment one transforms that set of signals into other signals our brain can make an understanding of, then information is born—it’s not in the beeps.”

The behaviorists, particularly John B. Watson in the United States and then, most famously, B. F. Skinner, made a science based on stimulus and response: food pellets, bells, electric shocks; salivation, lever pressing, maze running. Watson said that the whole purpose of psychology was to predict what responses would follow a given stimulus and what stimuli could produce a given behavior. Between stimulus and response lay a black box, known to be composed of sense organs, neural pathways, and motor functions, but fundamentally off limits. In effect, the behaviorists were saying yet again that the soul is ineffable.

Ears and eyes were to be understood as message channels, so why not test and measure them like microphones and cameras? “New concepts of the nature and measure of information,” wrote Homer Jacobson, a chemist at Hunter College in New York, “have made it possible to specify quantitatively the informational capacity of the human ear,” and he proceeded to do so. Then he did the same for the eye, arriving at an estimate four hundred times greater, in bits per second.

This was the beginning of the movement called the cognitive revolution in psychology, and it laid the foundation for the discipline called cognitive science, combining psychology, computer science, and philosophy. Looking back, some philosophers have called this moment the informational turn. “Those who take the informational turn see information as the basic ingredient in building a mind,”

For the box of gas to come unmixed is not physically impossible; it is just improbable in the extreme. So the second law is merely probabilistic. Statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy.

The second law, then, is the tendency of the universe to flow from less likely (orderly) to more likely (disorderly) macrostates.

To the physicist, entropy is a measure of uncertainty about the state of a physical system: one state among all the possible states it can be in. These microstates may not be equally likely, so the physicist writes S = −Σ pi log pi. To the information theorist, entropy is a measure of uncertainty about a message: one message among all the possible messages that a communications source can produce. The possible messages may not be equally likely, so Shannon wrote H = −Σ pi log pi.

“The transition was achieved by the development of organisms with the capacity for selectively exploiting this information in order to survive and perpetuate their kind.”

randomness in terms of its opposites, and he chose three: knowledge, causality, and design. What is known in advance, determined by a cause, or organized according to plan cannot be random.

The three are fundamentally equivalent: information, randomness, and complexity—three powerful abstractions, bound all along like secret lovers.

“Quantum mechanics has always been about information; it is just that the physics community has forgotten this.”

Information Is Inevitably Physical.” Whether a bit is a mark on a stone tablet or a hole in a punched card or a particle with spin up or down, he insisted that it could not exist without some embodiment.

Bennett found, heat dissipation occurs only when information is erased. Erasure is the irreversible logical operation.

The qubit is the smallest nontrivial quantum system. Like a classical bit, a qubit has two possible values, zero or one—which is to say, two states that can be reliably distinguished. In a classical system, all states are distinguishable in principle. (If you cannot tell one color from another, you merely have an imperfect measuring device.) But in a quantum system, imperfect distinguishability is everywhere, thanks to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. When you measure any property of a quantum object, you thereby lose the ability to measure a complementary property. You can discover a particle’s momentum or its position but not both. Other complementary properties include directions of spin and, as in Aunt Martha’s coffin, polarization. Physicists think of these quantum states in a geometrical way—the states of a system corresponding to directions in space

Its 0 and 1 values are represented by quantum states that can be reliably distinguished—for example, horizontal and vertical polarizations—but coexisting with these are the whole continuum of intermediate states, such as diagonal polarizations, that lean toward 0 or 1 with different probabilities. So a physicist says that a qubit is a superposition of states; a combination of probability amplitudes. It is a determinate thing with a cloud of indeterminacy living inside.

Entanglement takes the superposition principle and extends it across space, to a pair of qubits far apart from each other. They have a definite state as a pair even while neither has a measurable state on its own.

Nonlocality has been demonstrated in a variety of clever experiments all descended from the EPR thought experiment. Entanglement turns out to be not only real but ubiquitous. The atom pair in every hydrogen molecule, H2, is quantumly entangled

Communication is not faster than light, because Alice must also send Bob a classical (nonquantum) message on the side. “The net result of teleportation is completely prosaic: the removal of [the quantum object] from Alice’s hands and its appearance in Bob’s hands a suitable time later,” wrote Bennett and his colleagues. “The only remarkable feature is that in the interim, the information has been cleanly separated into classical and nonclassical parts.”

So he proposed fighting fire with fire. “The other way to simulate a probabilistic Nature, which I’ll call N for the moment, might still be to simulate the probabilistic Nature by a computer C which itself is probabilistic.” A quantum computer would not be a Turing machine, he said. It would be something altogether new.

In quantum computing, multiple qubits are entangled. Putting qubits at work together does not merely multiply their power; the power increases exponentially. In classical computing, where a bit is either-or, n bits can encode any one of 2n values. Qubits can encode these Boolean values along with all their possible superpositions. This gives a quantum computer a potential for parallel processing that has no classical equivalent. So quantum computers—in theory—can solve certain classes of problems that had otherwise been considered computationally infeasible.

The track of every canoe remains somewhere in the oceans.

the universe is a computer, we may still struggle to access its memory. If it is a library, it is a library without shelves. When all the world’s sounds disperse through the atmosphere, no word is left attached to any particular bunch of atoms. The words are anywhere and everywhere. That was why Babbage called this information store a “chaos.”

Another way to speak of the anxiety is in terms of the gap between information and knowledge. A barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to know. Knowledge, in turn, does not guarantee enlightenment or wisdom. (Eliot said that, too: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”)

Streufert concluded from the data that “superoptimal” information loads caused poor performance, “yet it should be noted that even at highly superoptimal information loads (i.e., 25 messages per 30-minute period), the subjects are still asking for increased information levels.”

“we invest stimuli with meaning, and apart from such investment, they are informationally barren.” But Dretske argues that distinguishing information and meaning can set a philosopher free. The engineers have provided an opportunity and a challenge: to understand how meaning can evolve; how life, handling and coding information, progresses to interpretation, belief, and knowledge.

A paradox is at work here: ours is a world about which we pretend to have more and more information but which seems to us increasingly devoid of meaning.

that words are not themselves ideas, but merely strings of ink marks; we see that sounds are nothing more than waves. In a modern age without an Author looking down on us from heaven, language is not a thing of definite certainty, but infinite possibility; without the comforting illusion of meaningful order we have no choice but to stare into the face of meaningless

find that A) tremendously comforting that we’re so close, and B) like Chinese water torture that we’re so close. Because you have to find the right six people to make the connection. There is not necessarily an algorithm for that. The network has a structure, and that structure stands upon a paradox. Everything is close, and everything is far, at the same time. This is why cyberspace can feel not just crowded but lonely. You can drop a stone into a well and never hear a splash.

This is the curse of omniscience: the answer to any question may arrive at the fingertips—via Google or Wikipedia or IMDb or YouTube or Epicurious or the National DNA Database or any of their natural heirs and successors—and still we wonder what we know.