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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Gleick
Read between
September 12 - October 31, 2022
By 1948 more than 125 million conversations passed daily through the Bell System’s 138 million miles of cable and 31 million telephone sets.
Later he worked with the mathematician and logician Hermann Weyl, who taught him what a theory was: “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.”
At Bell Labs, Claude Shannon was not thinking about physics. Particle physicists did not need bits. And then, all at once, they did. Increasingly, the physicists and the information theorists are one and the same. 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. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself.
John Archibald Wheeler, the last surviving collaborator of both Einstein and Bohr, put this manifesto in oracular monosyllables: “It from Bit.”
“What we call reality,” Wheeler wrote coyly, “arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions.”
We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.
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.”
For the Yaunde, the elephant is always “the great awkward one.” The resemblance to Homeric formulas—not merely Zeus, but Zeus the cloud-gatherer; not just the sea, but the wine-dark sea—is no accident. In an oral culture, inspiration has to serve clarity and memory first. The Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne.
Havelock described it as cultural warfare, a new consciousness and a new language at war with the old consciousness and the old language: “Their conflict produced essential and permanent contributions to the vocabulary of all abstract thought. Body and space, matter and motion, permanence and change, quality and quantity, combination and separation, are among the counters of common currency now available.”
The written word—the persistent word—was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it. It was the trigger for a wholesale, irreversible change in the human psyche—psyche being the word favored by Socrates/Plato as they struggled to understand. Plato, as Havelock puts it, is trying for the first time in history to identify this group of general mental qualities, and seeking for a term which will label them satisfactorily
under a single type.… He it was who hailed the portent and correctly identified it. In so doing, he so to speak confirmed and clinched the guesses of a previous generation which had been feeling its way towards the idea that you could “think,” and that thinking was a very special kind of psychic activity, very uncomfortable, but also very exciting, and one which required a very novel use of Greek.
There are no syllogisms in Homer. Experience is arranged in terms of events, not categories.
Russian psychologist Aleksandr Romanovich Luria among illiterate peoples in remote Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia in the 1930s. Luria found striking differences between illiterate and even slightly literate subjects, not in what they knew, but in how they thought.
A typical question: In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zembla is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What color are the bears? Typical response: “I don’t know. I’ve seen a black bear. I’ve never seen any others.… Each locality has its own animals.” By contrast, a man who has just learned to read and write responds, “To go by your words, they should all be white.” To go by your words—in that phrase, a level is crossed.
as soon as any culture invented logic, paradoxes appeared. In China, nearly contemporaneously with Aristotle, the philosopher Gongsun Long captured some of these in the form of a dialogue, known as “When a White Horse Is Not a Horse.”
Gongsun Long was a member of the Mingjia, the School of Names, and his delving into these paradoxes formed part of what Chinese historians call the “language crisis,” a running debate over the nature of language. Names are not the things they name.
“Spell Eva back and Ave shall you find,” wrote the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell (shortly before being hanged and quartered in 1595).
When certain educators did begin to consider the idea of spelling, they would say “right writing”—or, to borrow from Greek, “orthography.” Few bothered, but one who did was a school headmaster in London, Richard Mulcaster. He assembled a primer, titled “The first part [a second part was not to be] of the Elementarie which entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung.” He published it in 1582 (“at London by Thomas Vautroullier dwelling in the blak-friers by Lud-gate”), including his own list of about eight thousand words and a plea for the idea of a dictionary:
He recognized another motivating factor: the quickening pace of commerce and transportation made other languages a palpable presence, forcing an awareness of the English language as just one among many. “Forenners and strangers do wonder at us,” Mulcaster wrote, “both for the uncertaintie in our writing, and the inconstancie in our letters.” Language was no longer invisible like the air.
Friar Johannes Balbus of Genoa tried in his 1286 Catholicon. Balbus thought he was inventing alphabetical order for the first time, and his instructions were painstaking: “For example I intend to discuss amo and bibo. I will discuss amo before bibo because a is the first letter of amo and b is the first letter of bibo and a is before b in the alphabet. Similarly …” He rehearsed a long list of examples and concluded: “I beg of you, therefore, good reader, do not scorn this great labor of mine and this order as something worthless.” In the ancient world, alphabetical lists scarcely appeared
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chaos, a confused heap of mingle-mangle”).
The language was examining itself. Even when Cawdrey is copying from Coote or Thomas, he is fundamentally alone, with no authority to consult.
Natural philosophers were beginning to have a special interest in the nature of words and their meaning. They needed better than they had. When Galileo pointed his first telescope skyward and discovered sunspots in 1611, he immediately anticipated controversy—traditionally the sun was an epitome of purity—and he sensed that science could not proceed without first solving a problem of language: So long as men were in fact obliged to call the sun “most pure and most lucid,” no shadows or impurities whatever had been perceived in it; but now that it shows itself to us as partly impure and spotty;
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When Isaac Newton embarked on his great program, he encountered a fundamental lack of definition where it was most needed. He began with a semantic sleight of hand: “I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all,” he wrote deceptively. Defining these words was his very purpose.
His Expositour appeared in 1616 and went through several editions in the succeeding decades. Then in 1656 a London barrister, Thomas Blount, published his Glossographia: or a Dictionary, Interpreting all such Hard Words of Whatsoever Language, now used in our refined English Tongue. Blount’s dictionary listed more than eleven thousand words, many of which, he recognized, were new, reaching London in the hurly-burly of trade and commerce—
coffa or cauphe, a kind of drink among the Turks and Persians, (and of late introduced among us) which is black, thick and bitter, destrained from Berries of that nature, and name, thought good and very wholesom: they say it expels melancholy. —or home-grown, such as “tom-boy, a girle or wench that leaps up and down like a boy.”
The lexis is a measure of shared experience, which comes from interconnectedness. The number of users of the language forms only the first part of the equation: jumping in four centuries from 5 million English speakers to a billion. The driving factor is the number of connections between and among those speakers. A mathematician might say that messaging grows not geometrically, but combinatorially, which is much, much faster.
Light almost solar has been extracted from the refuse of fish; fire has been sifted by the lamp of Davy; and machinery has been taught arithmetic instead of poetry. —Charles Babbage (1832)
On his death in London in 1871 the Times obituarist declared him “one of the most active and original of original thinkers” but seemed to feel he was best known for his long, cranky crusade against street musicians and organ-grinders.
the messaging game known in Britain as Chinese Whispers, in China as , in Turkey as From Ear to Ear, and in the modern United States simply as Telephone. When his colleagues disregarded the problem of error correction, Ignace Chappe complained, “They have probably never performed experiments with more than two or three stations.”
stations are now silent. No movements of the indicators are to be seen. They are still upon their high positions, fast yielding to the wasting hand of time. The electric wire, though less grand in its appearance, traverses the empire, and with burning flames inscribes in the distance the will of the emperor to sixty-six millions of human beings scattered over his wide-spread dominions.
Pickering in Boston did the math: “If there are now essential advantages to business in obtaining intelligence from New York in two days, or less, or at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour, any man can perceive that there may be a proportionate benefit, when we can transmit the same information for that distance by telegraph at the rate of four miles in a minute, or in the space of a single hour, from New York to Boston.”
In England, Cooke was a young entrepreneur—he saw a prototype needle telegraph while traveling in Heidelberg—and Wheatstone a King’s College, London, physicist with whom Cooke formed a partnership in 1837. Wheatstone had performed experiments on the velocity of sound and of electricity, and once again the real problem lay in connecting the physics with language. They consulted England’s authority on electricity, Michael Faraday, and Peter Roget, author of a Treatise on Electro-Magnetism as well as the system of verbal classification he called the Thesaurus
Anticipated at every point by the lightning wings of the Telegraph, they can only deal in local “items” or abstract speculations. Their power to create sensations, even in election campaigns, will be greatly lessened—as the infallible Telegraph will contradict their falsehoods as fast as they can publish them.
The relationship between the telegraph and the newspaper was symbiotic. Positive feedback loops amplified the effect. Because the telegraph was an information technology, it served as an agent of its own ascendency.
“For all practical purposes,” one newspaper announced, “time, in the transit, may be regarded as entirely eliminated.” It was the same with space. “Distance and time have been so changed in our imaginations,” said Josiah Latimer Clark, an English telegraph engineer, “that the globe has been practically reduced in magnitude, and there can be no doubt that our conception of its dimensions is entirely different to that held by our forefathers.”
“babies are despised.” As the century turned, Bertrand Russell paid George Boole an extraordinary compliment: “Pure mathematics was discovered by Boole, in a work which he called the Laws of Thought.” It has been quoted often. What makes the compliment extraordinary is the seldom quoted disparagement that follows on its heels: He was also mistaken in supposing that he was dealing with the laws of thought: the question how people actually think was quite irrelevant to him, and if his book had really contained the laws of thought, it was curious that no one should ever have thought in such a way
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But wire was wire, and Claude Shannon was not the first to see this wide-ranging lattice as a potential communications grid. Thousands of farmers in remote places had the same idea. Unwilling to wait for the telephone companies to venture out from the cities, rural folk formed barbed-wire telephone cooperatives. They replaced metal staples with insulated fasteners. They attached dry batteries and speaking tubes and added spare wire to bridge the gaps. In the summer of 1895 The New York Times reported: “There can be no doubt that many rough-and-ready utilizations of the telephone are now being
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the liar’s paradox: This statement is false. The statement cannot be true, because then it is false. It cannot be false, because then it becomes true. It is neither true nor false, or it is both at once. But the discovery of this twisting, backfiring, mind-bending circularity does not bring life or language crashing to a halt—one grasps the idea and moves on—because life and language lack the perfection, the absolutes, that give them force.
One was Berry’s paradox, first suggested to Russell by G. G. Berry, a librarian at the Bodleian. It has to do with counting the syllables needed to specify each integer. Generally, of course, the larger the number the more syllables are required. In English, the smallest integer requiring two syllables is seven. The smallest requiring three syllables is eleven. The number 121 seems to require six syllables (“one hundred twenty-one”), but actually four will do the job, with some cleverness: “eleven squared.” Still, even with cleverness, there are only a finite number of possible syllables and
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“This statement is false” is meta-language: language about language. Russell’s paradoxical set relies on a meta-set: a set of sets. So the problem was a crossing of levels, or, as Russell termed it, a mixing of types. His solution: declare it illegal, taboo, out of bounds. No mixing different levels of abstraction. No self-reference; no self-containment. The rules of symbolism in Principia Mathematica would not allow the reaching-back-around, snake-eating-its-tail feedback loop that seemed to turn on the possibility of self-contradiction. This was his firewall. Enter Kurt Gödel.
One reason for these misguesses was just the usual failure of imagination in the face of a radically new technology. The telegraph lay in plain view, but its lessons did not extrapolate well to this new device. The telegraph demanded literacy; the telephone embraced orality. A message sent by telegraph had first to be written, encoded, and tapped out by a trained intermediary. To employ the telephone, one just talked. A child could use it. For that very reason it seemed like a toy. In fact, it seemed like a familiar toy, made from tin cylinders and string.
They had to design vacuum-tube repeaters to carry the electric current over long distance, making possible the first transcontinental line in 1914, between New York and San Francisco, 3,400 miles of wire suspended from 130,000 poles.
The engineers also discovered how to modulate individual currents so as to combine them in a single channel—multiplexing—without losing their identity. By 1918 they could get four conversations into a single pair of wires. But it was not currents that preserved identity. Before the engineers quite realized it, they were thinking in terms of the transmission of a signal, an abstract entity, quite distinct from the electrical waves in which it was embodied.
Thornton C. Fry, enjoyed the tension between theory and practice—the clashing cultures. “For the mathematician, an argument is either perfect in every detail or else it is wrong,” he wrote in 1941. “He calls this ‘rigorous thinking.’ The typical engineer calls it ‘hair-splitting.’
In 1905, his finest year, Einstein published a paper on Brownian motion, the random, jittery motion of tiny particles suspended in a fluid. Antony van Leeuwenhoek had discovered it with his early microscope, and the phenomenon was named after Robert Brown, the Scottish botanist who studied it carefully in 1827: first pollen in water, then soot and powdered rock. Brown convinced himself that these particles were not alive—they were not animalcules—yet they would not sit still. In a mathematical tour de force, Einstein explained this as a consequence of the heat energy of molecules, whose
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