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

by Jimmy Soni

As long as we respect the speed limit of the channel, there is no limit to our accuracy, no limit to the amount of noise through which we can make ourselves heard. Yes, overcoming more errors, or representing more characters, would demand more complex codes. So would combining the advantages of codes that compress and codes that guard against error: that is, reducing a message to bits as efficiently as possible, and then adding the redundancy that protects its accuracy. Coding and decoding would still exact their cost in effort and time. But Shannon’s proof stood: there is always an answer. The answer is digital. Here Shannon completed the reimagining that began with his thesis and his switches eleven years earlier. 1’s and 0’s could enact the entirety of logic. 1’s and 0’s stood for the fundamental nature of information, an equal choice from a set of two. And now it was evident that any message could be sent flawlessly—we could communicate anything of any complexity to anyone at any distance—provided it was translated into 1’s and 0’s. Logic is digital. Information is digital.