A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

by Jimmy Soni

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do and, even if their genius is unrecognized in their lifetime, the essential earthly reward is always theirs, the certainty that their work is good and will stand the test of time. One suspects that the geniuses will be least in the Kingdom of Heaven—if, indeed, they ever make it; they have had their reward.

“It was,” he said, “as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference.

who thought his best thoughts in spartan bachelor apartments and empty office buildings.

Of course, information existed before Shannon, just as objects had inertia before Newton. But before Shannon, there was precious little sense of information as an idea, a measurable quantity, an object fitted out for hard science. Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits.

That leap, as Walter Isaacson put it, “became the basic concept underlying all digital computers.” It was Shannon’s first great feat of abstraction. He was only twenty-one.

Bell Labs, an industrial R&D operation that considered itself less an arm of the phone company than a home for “the operation of genius.” “People did very well at Bell Labs,” said one of Shannon’s colleagues, “when they did what others thought was impossible.”

Carl Sagan called “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”—and transmitted that picture across four billion miles of void. Claude Shannon did not write the code that protected that image from error and distortion, but, some four decades earlier, he had proved that such a code must exist. And so it did. It is part of his legacy; and so is the endless flow of digital information on which the Internet depends, and so is the information omnivory by which we define ourselves as modern.

His best ideas waited years for publication, and his interest drifted across problems on a private channel of its own.

His was a life spent in the pursuit of curious, serious play; he was that rare scientific genius who was just as content rigging up a juggling robot or a flamethrowing trumpet as he was pioneering digital circuits. He worked with levity and played with gravity; he never acknowledged a distinction between the two. His genius lay above all in the quality of the puzzles he set for himself. And the marks of his playful mind—the mind that wondered how a box of electric switches could mimic a brain, and the mind that asked why no one ever decides to say “XFOML RXKHRJFFJUJ”—are imprinted on all of his deepest insights. Maybe it is too much to presume that the character of an age bears some stamp of the character of its founders; but it would be pleasant to think that so much of what is essential to ours was conceived in the spirit of play.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote sixty-five stories. This one, “The Gold-Bug,” is the only one to end with a lecture on cryptanalysis. It is Claude Shannon’s favorite.

Biographies of geniuses often open as stories of overzealous parenting. We think of Beethoven’s father, beating his son into the shape of a prodigy. Or John Stuart Mill’s father, drilling his son in Greek at the tender age of three. Or Norbert Wiener’s father, declaring to the world that he could turn anything, even a broomstick, into a genius with enough time and discipline. “Norbert always felt like that broomstick,” a contemporary later remarked.

He loved science and disliked facts. Or rather, he disliked the kind of facts that he couldn’t bring under a rule and abstract his way out of.

Whatever the cause, Claude spent his remaining school vacations at an uncle’s. He and his mother would barely interact for the rest of his life.

tailor-made for a young man who could find equal joy in equations and construction, thinking and building. “I pushed hard for that job and got it. That was one of the luckiest things of my life,”

Luck may have played a role, but the application’s acceptance was also a testament to the keen eye of a figure who would shape the rest of Shannon’s life and the course of American science: Vannevar Bush.

“Look, in twenty years the guts of this lawnmower will run the most powerful thinking machine that human hands have ever built”—

the twenty-two-year-old inventor would one day be, although he couldn’t possibly imagine it yet, the most powerful scientist in America.

He would preside over a custom-made brain the size of a room. He’d counsel presidents. He’d direct the nation’s scientists through World War II with the same brusqueness with which he once imagined unemploying two-thirds of the surveying profession. Collier’s magazine would call him “the man who may win or lose the war”; Time, “the general of physics.”

But now drop the apple on Newton in the open air. Gravity’s force, of course, doesn’t change. But the faster the apple falls, the greater the resistance of the air pushing back against it. The apple’s acceleration now depends on both the gravity speeding it up and the air resistance slowing it down, which in turn depends on the apple’s speed at any moment, which in turn is changing every fraction of a second. That is the kind of problem that calls for a more-than-ordinary brain.

How fast can a population of animals grow before it crashes? How long before a heap of radioactive uranium decays? How far does a magnet’s force extend? How much does a massive sun curve time and space? To ask any of these questions is to ask for the solution to a differential equation.

It turned out that most differential equations of the useful kind—the apple-falling-in-the-real-world kind, not the apple-falling-down-a-chalkboard kind—presented just the same impassable problem. These were not equations that could be solved by formulas or shortcuts, only by trial and error, or intuition, or luck. To solve them reliably—to bring the force of calculus to bear on the industrial problems of power transmission or telephone networks, or on the advanced physics problems of cosmic rays and subatomic particles—demanded an intelligence of another order.

But a half century after Newton, mathematicians found that the most chaotic-seeming fluctuations—from stock prices to tide charts—could be broken down and represented as the sum of much simpler functions, wavelike patterns that did indeed repeat themselves. Anarchy concealed order; or rather, anarchy was dozens of kinds of order happening at once, all shouting to be heard over one another. So how to find the order in the tides?

“Go, wondrous creature! mount where Science guides; / Go measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides.”

A naval battle at that range was not simply a gunfight, but a mathematical race (in which the reward for second place was often a watery grave).

sitting stunned as Bush punctured their self-regard. He would rise at the lectern, hold up a simple pipe wrench, and offer a simple challenge: “Describe this.”

Given the pipe wrench, produce the words for that wrench and no other; given the words, produce the wrench. That, Bush taught his students, was the beginning of engineering.

“an electrical switch controlled by electricity (a looping idea).” Open. Close. Weeks and months of this.

The Laws of Thought. Those laws, Boole showed, are founded on just a few fundamental operations: for instance, AND, OR, NOT, and

A leap from logic to symbols to circuits: “I think I had more fun doing that than anything else in my life,” Shannon remembered fondly.

Circuit design was, for the first time, a science. And turning art into science would be the hallmark of Shannon’s career.

That same year, the British mathematician Alan Turing published a famously critical step toward machine intelligence. He had proven that any solvable mathematical problem could, in principle, be solved by machine. He had pointed the way toward computers that could reprogram their own instructions as they worked, all-purpose machines of a flexibility far beyond any that had yet been conceived. Now, Shannon had shown that any sensical statement of logic could, in principle, be evaluated by machine.

It’s been said that most of the great writers have bibliographies, not biographies. The kind of life requisite to their work leaves little behind but the words themselves.

the reduction of big problems to their essential core.

There are passionate scientists who are almost overcome by the abundance of the world, who are gluttons for facts; and then there are those who stand a step back from the world, their apartness a condition of their work. Shannon was one of this latter kind: an abstracted man.

“What’s your secret in remaining so carefree?” an interviewer asked Shannon toward the end of his life. Shannon answered, “I do what comes naturally, and usefulness is not my main goal. . . . I keep asking myself, How would you do this? Is it possible to make a machine do that? Can you prove this theorem?”

Shannon was an atheist, and seems to have come by it naturally, without any crisis of faith; puzzling over the origins of human intelligence with the same interviewer, he said matter-of-factly, “I don’t happen to be a religious man and I don’t think it would help if I were!” And yet, in his instinct that the world we see merely stands for something else, there is an inkling that his distant Puritan ancestors might have recognized as kin.

“I am convinced that Shannon is not only unusual but is in fact a near-genious [sic] of most unusual promise.” With the president’s permission, he would ban Shannon from the cockpit: such a life wasn’t worth risking in a crash.

“Somehow I doubt the advisability of urging a young man to refrain from flying or arbitrarily to take the opportunity away from him, on the ground of his being intellectually superior. I doubt whether it would be good for the development of his own character and personality.”

Bush described him to a colleague as “a decidedly unconventional type of youngster. . . . He is a very shy and retiring sort of individual, exceedingly modest, and who would readily be thrown off the track.”

“Bush believed Shannon to be an almost universal genius, whose talents might be channeled in any direction.” More than that, Bush took it upon himself to choose the direction.

When news of the award reached Shannon, he knew whom to thank. “I have a sneaking suspicion that you have not only heard about it but had something to do with my getting it,” Shannon wrote to Bush. “If so, thanks a lot.”

deep conviction for Bush that specialization was the death of genius. “In these days, when there is a tendency to specialize so closely, it is well for us to be reminded that the possibilities of being at once broad and deep did not pass with Leonardo da Vinci or even Benjamin Franklin,”

“Men of our profession—we teachers—are bound to be impressed with the tendency of youths of strikingly capable minds to become interested in one small corner of science and uninterested in the rest of the world. . . . It is unfortunate when a brilliant and creative mind insists upon living in a modern monastic cell.”

“To advise a youth like Shannon is difficult, is it not?” All the same, Shannon still had to learn the entire field of genetics from scratch. Alleles, chromosomes, heterozygosity—when he first sat down to it, he confessed to Bush, he didn’t even understand the words. From this impoverished start, he (mostly) mastered a new science and produced publishable work in less than a year.

But this faith in his own originality cost him: at one point, he presented as a new discovery a theorem that had been common knowledge among biologists for two decades.

“Although I looked through the textbooks on Genetics fairly carefully, I didn’t have the courage to tackle the periodical literature.

could reach heights of creativity in an adopted language because he had missed learning its clichés in his youth.

“I need your guidance before I speak to him concerning this particular thing,” he wrote to a Harvard statistician, “for what I say will either encourage or discourage him greatly.” That worry speaks to the touchy pride that Bush saw in his student, “a man who should be handled with great care”—as well as to the simple fact that Shannon’s academic life to date, from Gaylord to Cambridge, had been free of failure.

after the effort of discovery, the effort of communication was secondary, by far. He had solved a problem to his own satisfaction—and that, as far as he was concerned, was

Shannon explained later: “After I had found the answers it was always painful to write them up or to publish them (which is how you get the acclaim).” A more magniloquent scientist might have added something about the pure Platonic joy of discovery. Not Shannon, though: “Too lazy, I guess.”