I don't often write up notes on the books I read, but I enjoyed James Gleick's The Information so much (apart from getting a little lost in the section on quantum physics), that I'm going to try and make sense below of what I jotted down on my iPhone Notes app:
Right now, we're living in a world flooded with data, and this is a situation that has come about rapidly since the dawn of the digital age. An American mathematician Claude Shannon (no, me neither), of MIT and Bell Labs, was the guy who ignited this information revolution. In essence, as the father of information theory, he developed the concept of "It from Bit", or how meaning is derived from information. Shannon, the son of German immigrants and an avid reader of the works of Edgar Allen Poe, was a pioneer who established connections between the worlds of electricity & logic, especially the Boolean algebra that is fundamental to computing.
Although Shannon is a central figure, the book also focuses on the wide variety of information innovators throughout history, such as African tribes and Robert Cawdrey, the 1600s inventor of the first dictionary. Information systems are as old as the hills, such as fire beacons used by the Greeks in the Trojan War (made famous by Lord Of The Rings, but first written about by Homer) and African drums. Throughout history, Gleick also shows how there's been a constant nostalgia for a fading form of communication, first felt by Socrates with the transition from oral to literary culture in Ancient Greece. Nowadays, people feel the same nostalgia for handwritten letters and telegraphs.
Gleick also explains the concept of the "logos", and how logic is a mental construct that didn't exist before the Greeks created the alphabet. In China, the language had more ambiguity and woolly syntax, causing paradoxes that led to a crisis at the School of Names. Another interesting historical passage explored in the book is the advent of the telegraph system in France. On seizing power in 1799, Napoleon used the newly invented telegraph system to convey the message, "Paris est tranquille et les bons citoyens sont contents" (Paris is calm and its good citizens are happy), but the country's heavy investment in a soon-to-become antiquated technology meant that France was late to adopt modern technology like electrical wire transmission. The medium of telegraph engendered the same sort of info compression seen by users of texting or Twitter, with creative shorthand terms like "ymir" (your message is received). But soon telephones arrived and, unlike telegraphs or other prior technologies, they unleashed a social revolution in 1880 that paved the way for skyscrapers and the introduction of women into the white collar workforce (albeit working for low pay at telephone exchanges).
I also enjoyed how the book focused on South Londoner, Charles Babbage, a man who loved maths and looked beyond the dominant influence of Isaac Newton to Leibniz, and expanded the field of calculus to such an extent that he's now known as the father of computing. Babbage sought to create a new language free of ambiguity & error, and his Eureka moment was developing machinery that could count out logarithm tables by machinery: his famous Analytical Engine. The book also explores his love affair with Ada Lovelace, a visionary mathematician who saw how the analytical machine could be a processor not just of numbers but also language & music.
Another Brit that features prominently in the story of how information and data came to rule the world is Alan Turing, famous as the Enigma code breaker of Bletchley Park. Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, arch cryptanalysts for the US & UK respectively during World War II, were together at Bell Labs in 1943 but both were sworn to secrecy so never discussed their work. There is a clear lineage between Babbage's Analytical Engine and Turing's Universal Machine, which was created a 100 years later. Such was Turing's influence that he is now known as the father of programming, while Claude Shannon is seen as the progenitor of the information age and co-creator of cyberspace. The book also takes in Schrodinger and his seminal work, What Is Life?, which inspired Crick to discover how DNA info is coded and transmitted, Dawkins and the concept of memes, Godel's incompleteness and Heisenberg's uncertainty theorems, quantum computing, Foster Wallace and his concept of Total Noise, and finishes with Borges, prophet of the information age with his Library of Babel story. So plenty of food for thought.
Right now, we're living in a world flooded with data, and this is a situation that has come about rapidly since the dawn of the digital age. An American mathematician Claude Shannon (no, me neither), of MIT and Bell Labs, was the guy who ignited this information revolution. In essence, as the father of information theory, he developed the concept of "It from Bit", or how meaning is derived from information. Shannon, the son of German immigrants and an avid reader of the works of Edgar Allen Poe, was a pioneer who established connections between the worlds of electricity & logic, especially the Boolean algebra that is fundamental to computing.
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| Claude Shannon |
Although Shannon is a central figure, the book also focuses on the wide variety of information innovators throughout history, such as African tribes and Robert Cawdrey, the 1600s inventor of the first dictionary. Information systems are as old as the hills, such as fire beacons used by the Greeks in the Trojan War (made famous by Lord Of The Rings, but first written about by Homer) and African drums. Throughout history, Gleick also shows how there's been a constant nostalgia for a fading form of communication, first felt by Socrates with the transition from oral to literary culture in Ancient Greece. Nowadays, people feel the same nostalgia for handwritten letters and telegraphs.
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| Beacons of Minas Tirith |
Gleick also explains the concept of the "logos", and how logic is a mental construct that didn't exist before the Greeks created the alphabet. In China, the language had more ambiguity and woolly syntax, causing paradoxes that led to a crisis at the School of Names. Another interesting historical passage explored in the book is the advent of the telegraph system in France. On seizing power in 1799, Napoleon used the newly invented telegraph system to convey the message, "Paris est tranquille et les bons citoyens sont contents" (Paris is calm and its good citizens are happy), but the country's heavy investment in a soon-to-become antiquated technology meant that France was late to adopt modern technology like electrical wire transmission. The medium of telegraph engendered the same sort of info compression seen by users of texting or Twitter, with creative shorthand terms like "ymir" (your message is received). But soon telephones arrived and, unlike telegraphs or other prior technologies, they unleashed a social revolution in 1880 that paved the way for skyscrapers and the introduction of women into the white collar workforce (albeit working for low pay at telephone exchanges).
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| France's once proud telegraph network |
I also enjoyed how the book focused on South Londoner, Charles Babbage, a man who loved maths and looked beyond the dominant influence of Isaac Newton to Leibniz, and expanded the field of calculus to such an extent that he's now known as the father of computing. Babbage sought to create a new language free of ambiguity & error, and his Eureka moment was developing machinery that could count out logarithm tables by machinery: his famous Analytical Engine. The book also explores his love affair with Ada Lovelace, a visionary mathematician who saw how the analytical machine could be a processor not just of numbers but also language & music.
 |
| Babbage's Analytical Engine |
Another Brit that features prominently in the story of how information and data came to rule the world is Alan Turing, famous as the Enigma code breaker of Bletchley Park. Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, arch cryptanalysts for the US & UK respectively during World War II, were together at Bell Labs in 1943 but both were sworn to secrecy so never discussed their work. There is a clear lineage between Babbage's Analytical Engine and Turing's Universal Machine, which was created a 100 years later. Such was Turing's influence that he is now known as the father of programming, while Claude Shannon is seen as the progenitor of the information age and co-creator of cyberspace. The book also takes in Schrodinger and his seminal work, What Is Life?, which inspired Crick to discover how DNA info is coded and transmitted, Dawkins and the concept of memes, Godel's incompleteness and Heisenberg's uncertainty theorems, quantum computing, Foster Wallace and his concept of Total Noise, and finishes with Borges, prophet of the information age with his Library of Babel story. So plenty of food for thought.
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