James Gleick's books - Chaos, Genius, Isaac Newton, and the present - share the attractive traits of being intelligently conceived, meticulously researched and beautifully realized;the author is erudite, conveys the distinctive atmosphere of an era, the character of its actors, the anectode while he is a delightful storyteller;his prose is simple but conceptually rich and expansive. The book traces the evolution of human communication and its impact on culture from oral communication to the twenty-first century and the internet, Wikipedia and cloud computing. A recurring theme in this evolution is the rapid increase in information which in recent years has been phenomenal with information increasing exponentially.
Because of its centrality in the book, I commence the review and somewhat elaborate on Shannon's 'Theory of Information'. The year 1948 was for Bell Telephone Laboratories an annus mirabilis. During that year Claude Shannon then aged 32 published his theory of information titled 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' while working at Bell Labs and coined the word bit;the transistor was invented in the same year and lab but the word 'transistor' was the product of committee deliberation.
Shannon in his theory defines the information content of an event as being proportional to the logarithm of its inverse probability of occurence. Shannon's theory of information is related to Entropy in that an increase in Entropy in a system increases its disorder while concurrently increasing its information content.
In Shannon's theory of information, the fundamental concept of distinguishability between two different states is a bit of information. A bit, by definition, exists in one of two different states at any given time - a zero or a one;where you have more than two outcomes, you simply use more bits to distinguish them all. Shannon's information theory relates to events based on Boolean logic i.e for an event with several outcomes, each outcome happens or does not happen.
Shannon's information theory has a very wide applicability in that it has the same logical foundation in different physical, biological, social and economic phenomena.
All the preceding relate to classical physics and the classical worldview. However, a more accurate description of our physical world is given by quantum theory which has superseded classical physics. With quantum theory the notion of a deterministic world fails, events always occur with a probability regardless of how much information we possess.
Classical bits as we have already explained exist in one of two different states at any given time - a zero or a one. With quantum mechanics, however, we are permitted to have a zero and a one at the same time in one physical system. In fact we are permitted to have an infinite range of states between zero and one which we call a qubit.
It has been established that Shannon's theory of information can be successfully extended to account for quantum theory and potentially to a quantum computer with enormous capability.
The evolution from oral speech to writing was effected through a progression from pictographic, writing the picture;to ideographic, writing the idea;and then logographic, writing the word. This journey led from things to words, from words to categories, from categories to metaphor and logic. We know that formal logic is the invention of Greek culture after it had interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing. The culture of literacy developed its many gifts:history and the law;the sciences and philosophy;the reflective application of art and literature itself.
For a long period the written word was the task of scribes. The revolution came from Johannes Gutenberg (c.1400-68) who was the first in the West to print using movable type and was the first to use a press. Printing books naturally assisted in their wide dissemination. But it was left to Elizabeth Eisenstein in her landmark scholarship, two volumes titled 'The Printing Press as an Agent of Change'published in 1979 to conclusively demonstrate printing as the communications revolution essential to the transition from medieval times to modernity.
And from the extensive treatment of Shannon's theory of information to the telegraphic presentation of the three waves of electrical communication erected in sequence:telegraphy, telephony, and radio which collectively annihilated space and time. Naturally ingenuity was required to effect the crossing point between electricity and language and also the interface between device and human.
It is worth noting that both Claude Shannon for whom we have spoken at length and Alan Turing, the British genius, who apart from breaking the German Enigma code also conceived the elegant ethereal abstaction of Universal machine were engaged in cryptography during World War II and even met in Bell labs cafeteria but naturally did not talk to each other on the specific nature of their secret work.
I shall conclude the review with information in biological systems:DNA serves as one-dimensional storage of information;DNA also (information transfer)sends that information outward for use in the making of the organism. The data stored in a one-dimensional strand has to flower forth in three dimensions. This information transfer occurs via messages passing from nucleic acids to proteins. So DNA not only replicates itself;separately, it dictates the manufacture of something entirely different.
When the genetic code was solved, in the early 1960s, it turned to be full of redundancy. The redundancy serves exactly the purpose that an information theorist would expect. It provides tolerance for errors.
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