So from Hartley to Shannon, said Bell Labs’ John Pierce, the science of information “appears to have taken a prolonged and comfortable rest.” Blame Hartley’s relativity fixation, perhaps. Or blame the war—a war that unleashed tremendous applications in plane-tracking robot bombs and digital telephony, in code making and codebreaking and computing, but a war that saw few scientists with the time or incentive to step back and ask what had been learned about communication in general. Or simply blame the fact that the next and decisive step after Hartley could only be found with genius and time.
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