The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Monod proposed an analogy: Just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an “abstract kingdom” rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas. Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness. When Wells used the word network—a word he liked very much—it retained its original, physical meaning for him, as it would for anyone in his time. He visualized threads or wires interlacing: “A network of marvellously gn

For McLuhan this was prerequisite to the creation of global consciousness—global knowing. “Today,” he wrote, “we have extended our central nervous systems in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness,

The common element was randomness, Chaitin suddenly thought. Shannon linked randomness, perversely, to information. Physicists had found randomness inside the atom—the kind of randomness that Einstein deplored by complaining about God and dice. All these heroes of science were talking about or around randomness.

Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy: “Information is closely associated with uncertainty.” Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information. Some messages may be likelier than others, and information implies s

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 o

Queen Victoria installed one at Windsor Castle and one at Buckingham Palace (fabricated in ivory; a gift from the savvy Bell). The topology changed when the number of sets reachable by other sets passed a critical threshold, and that happened surprisingly soon. Then community networks arose, their multiple connections managed through a new apparatu

Thus Gödel showed that a consistent formal system must be incomplete; no complete and consistent system can exist.

The ability of a thermodynamic system to produce work depends not on the heat itself, but on the contrast between hot and cold. A hot stone plunged into cold water can generate work—for example, by creating steam that drives a turbine—but the total heat in the system (stone plus water) remains constant. Eventually, the stone and the water reach the