The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick

An invention even more profound and more fundamental came in a monograph spread across seventy-nine pages of The Bell System Technical Journal in July and October. No one bothered with a press release. It carried a title both simple and grand—“A Mathematical Theory of Communication”—and the message was hard to summarize. But it was a fulcrum around which the world began to turn. Like the transistor, this development also involved a neologism: the word bit, chosen in this case not by committee but by the lone author, a thirty-two-year-old named Claude Shannon. The bit now joined the inch, the pound, the quart, and the minute as a determinate quantity—a fundamental unit of measure.

“A unit for measuring information,” Shannon wrote,

“Theories permit consciousness to ‘jump over its own shadow,’ to leave behind the given, to represent the transcendent, yet, as is self-evident, only in symbols.”

In 1943 the English mathematician and code breaker Alan Turing visited Bell Labs on a

cryptographic mission and met Shannon sometimes over lunch, where they traded speculation on the future of artificial thinking machines.

“Off and on,” Shannon wrote to Vannevar Bush at MIT in 1939, “I have been working on an analysis of some of the fundamental properties of general systems for the transmission of intelligence.”

Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time—and gave them new meanings.

Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas.

Shannon’s theory made a bridge between information and uncertainty; between information and entropy; and between information and chaos.

Information processing was born, along with information storage and information retrieval.

“Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer,” remarked Marshall McLuhan in 1967.*

We can see now that information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle.

Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.

Now even biology has become an information science,

a subject of messages, instructions, and code.

The body itself is an information processor.

No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory.

“What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life,’ ” declares the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. “It is information, words, instructions.… If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.”

receiving, coding and decoding.

“The information circle becomes the unit of life,” says Werner Loewenstein after thirty years spent studying intercellular communication. He reminds us that information means something deeper now: “It connotes a cosmic principle of organization and order, and it provides an exact measure of that.” The gene has its cultural analog, too: the meme. In cultural evolution, a meme is a replicator and propagator—an idea, a fashion, a chain letter, or a conspiracy theory. On a bad day, a meme is a virus.

Economics is recognizing itself as an information science, now that money itself is completing a developmental arc from matter to bits, stored in computer memory and magnetic strips, world finance coursing through the global nervous system.

Even when money seemed to be material treasure, heavy in pockets and ships’ holds and ...

inform...

technologies for tokenizing ...

Matter has its own coinage, and the hardest science of all, physics, seemed t...

At Bell Labs, Claude Shannon was not thinking about physics. Particle physicists did not need bits.

The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract—a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no.

as scientists finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself.

They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms th...

John Archibald Wheeler, the last surviving collaborator of both Einstein and Bohr, put this manifesto in oracular monosyllables: “It from Bit.” Information gives rise to “every it—every particle, every...

the outcome of an experiment is affected, or even determined, when it is observed.

“What we call reality,” Wheeler wrote

coyly, “arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions.” He added: “All things physical are information-theoretic in origin, and this is a participatory universe.”

When particles or quantum systems are entangled, their properties remain correlated across vast distances and vast times.

When photons and electrons and other particles interact, what are they really doing? Exchanging bits, transmitting quantum states, processing information.

How big is its total information capacity, its memory space?

(“The bit count of the cosmos, however it is figured, is ten raised to a very large power,” according to Wheeler. According to Seth Lloyd: “No more than 10120 ops on 1090 bits.”)

We have information fatigue, anxiety, and glut.

John Robinson Pierce

“It is hard to picture the world before Shannon as it seemed to those who lived in it. It is difficult to recover innocence, ignorance, and lack of understanding.”

The greatest gift of Prometheus to humanity was not fire after all: “Numbers, too, chiefest of sciences, I invented for them, and the

combining of letters, creative mother of the Muses’ arts, with which to hold all things in memory.”

The alphabet was a founding technology o...

Our culture has absorbed a working vocabulary for these useful inventions. We speak of compressing data, aware that this is quite different from compressing a gas.

“The invention of printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of letters is no great matter.”

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought.

In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

The drums generated fountains of oratory. This seemed inefficient. Was it grandiloquence or bombast? Or something else?

For a long time Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa had no idea. In fact they had no idea that the drums conveyed information at all.

in special cases a drum could be an instrumen...