The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Summary)
Long before Morse code or fiber optics, West African drummers were transmitting complex messages over miles just by mimicking the pitch and rhythm of human speech. These 'talking drums' weren't just beating out a rhythm; they were encoding language, proving that information theory—the science of bits, bandwidth, and noise—isn't a modern invention but a fundamental human quest.
To Transmit a Message, You Must Ignore its Meaning
Claude Shannon's revolutionary breakthrough was to separate information from meaning. To create a universal theory of communication, he had to ignore what a message meant and focus only on quantifying and transmitting the data itself.
Shannon realized that from an engineering standpoint, it doesn't matter if a sequence of bits represents Shakespeare's sonnets or a random string of nonsense. The challenge is the same: transmitting those bits from point A to point B with perfect fidelity. This insight divorced engineering from semantics and paved the way for the digital age.
Redundancy is a Feature, Not a Bug
We often think of redundancy as wasteful, but Gleick shows it's an essential tool for fighting 'noise'—the inevitable errors and corruption in any communication channel. Languages and codes are deliberately inefficient to ensure the message gets through.
The English language is roughly 50% redundant. That's why 'u cn rd ths sentnce evn wth mst of th vwls mssng.' The built-in repetition allows our brains to reconstruct the message, a principle now used in error-correction codes that ensure the data on your hard drive or streaming from Netflix arrives intact.
The Universe Might Be a Computer
Gleick explores the radical idea that at its most fundamental level, the universe isn't made of matter or energy, but of information. Every particle interaction, every quantum state, can be seen as a form of computation.
Physicist John Archibald Wheeler coined the phrase 'it from bit.' This suggests that every 'it'—every particle and force in the physical world—derives its very existence from 'bits' of information generated by yes-or-no questions posed at the quantum level. In this view, reality is the output of a cosmic information-processing system.
The Library of Babel Is Now Real
The sheer volume of information has created a new kind of problem: not a scarcity of knowledge, but an overwhelming flood that makes finding truth and meaning harder than ever.
Gleick points to Jorge Luis Borges's story of a library containing every possible book, where all knowledge exists but is buried in an infinity of gibberish. The modern internet is our Library of Babel: we have access to all human knowledge, but it's mixed with an endless sea of misinformation, spam, and trivia, forcing us to become librarians of our own attention.
