I knew that James Gleick wrote biographies of Feynman and Isaac Newton and is famous for his book Chaos: Making a New Science. But did you know that James Gleick made his fortune as the developer of Pipeline, one of the earliest Internet service providers? To this day, you may find some paleolithic Internet users still using their Pipeline e-mail addresses under the Earthlink aegis. Is it any wonder that information would be of paramount importance to him? To bring the rest of us up to speed about our current age, he’s written The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. Its central tenet: meaning is irrelevant; coding is everything.
Dava Sobel, whose book, Longitude, was a popular selection of the e-Readers & Book Lovers Club (1 and 2), has most recently authored A More Perfect Heaven. Sobel is a consummate story teller and in her latest work, she echoes Galileo’s Daughter when she tells us the story of Copernicus’ life and legacy. This is the man who upset the Universe when he established the fact of a heliocentric solar system. How scary to think what might not have been if it hadn’t been for Georg Joachim Rheticus who traveled across Europe to convince Copernicus that he needed to write it all down in what is known as De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres).
What a neat pairing these two authors, appearing at the same time before an eager audience, turned out to be. For it wasn’t until 1948 that man understood that all of human history is information, a concept that must have bloomed a little in Rheticus’ own thinking.
Says Gleick, “I began at a specific point in the history of time. 1948. The beginning of our modern era occurred in the Bell Telephone & Telegraph Labs. Scientists working there developed a device, the transistor and said about their invention, ‘It may have far-reaching significance for electronics and communication. The second most significant development that has characterized our age was also developed that year in the same labs. It was not a device, not a thing, but something more profound that was published in a dry little monograph, A Mathematical Theory of Communication in which its author, Claude Shannon, coined a neologism, “bit,” a unit for measuring information.
“As a child, Shannon built a barbed wire telegraph. He liked codes. At 22, his thesis applied logic to electricity, considering a fact to be an open or closed circuit. When Shannon met Turing, the latter had this to say. ‘Shannon wants to feed not just data into the computer, he wants to insert music!’ And Shannon himself wrote to Vanover Bush, ‘I have been working on a method to transmit intelligence.’ Shannon wanted to do with information what Newton had done for force, energy, and mass. It was Shannon who linked information to everything. In recognition of what we are as human beings, Melissa McEwen expressed it this way: ‘Man, the food gatherer became man, the information gatherer.’
“Now we know all science is information. Genese, the neural network – DNA is the quintessential information code. 16M bits make a human being. Richard Dawkins tells us that what lies at the heart of every living thing is information, not warm gels and ooze.
"Our everyday devices are all about transmitting, generating, analyzing and storing information and always have been. From the stone stele to the punch card, to the flash card to the smart phone, our devices are mechanical extensions of our biological being. Information.”
For a timeline of the developments in the Information Age, see From Cave Paintings to the Internet.
But information is only useful if it’s effectively communicated. Consider Copernicus who sat on his information for a lifetime.
In 1973, Copernicu’s 500th anniversary, Dava Sobel got the idea to write a play about his life, stimulated by the excitement in the nerd press that surrounded the event.
“Copernicus,” she recalls, “got his heliocentric idea when a relatively young man. He promised the world his book that would explain it all, but it never happened. Instead, he sat on his idea, afraid of religious critics, until he was visited at the end of his life by a young German mathematician and astronomer, Georg Joachim Rheticus, who became know as the first Copernican. It was due to his one-man effort that Copernicus sat down and wrote his book. Rheticus saw it through copying and printing. It was immediately put on the Index by the Catholic Church, prohibiting the faithful to read it. Remarkably, the original manuscript still exists because Copernicus, once he’d written the book, would not part with it, even to send it to the printer. Only copies were used for that purpose. Owen Gingrich has written a book titled The Book Nobody Read, which is about all the extant copies of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium.
“Like Copernicus, I got scared off of my idea to write a play – something I really knew nothing about – and did nothing about putting my thoughts on this remarkable scientist to paper until now. I figured, before setting out on this book, that I could learn to write a play, I had no idea how difficult it would be. I balked at having to make things up when I’d spent a lifetime trying not to.
“Copernicus left only 17 letters and compared to Galileo who left 1000 of his own letter, 1000 from his correspondents, including the ones to and from his daughter. Three of Copernicus’ letters are about the woman who lives with him in what may or may not have been a sort of love nest. But the fact that she does under the arrangement – whatever it is – that she does, enrages the bishop and she is forced out.
“Rheticus’ presence is just as bad. He is, after all, a heretic, being a Lutheran. Yet he stops at Copernicus’ home for two years. This is even worse in the eyes of the bishop than the sin of Copernicus having ‘lived with’ his cook. The story in my book revolves around the problem of Rheticus to get Copernicus to write his treatise, make a copy that his boss will part with, and get it to a publisher in Nuremberg. For me, the latter day playwright, the problem became how to use the cook? Finally, I took the obvious path and made her the love interest.
“Once I wrote the play, I needed an actual book to be the companion piece – also to better please my own publisher. So, the book’s structure is one third back story of Copernicus’ life; a second third that is the play; the last third about Copernicus’ book. I’m happy with it, but (like Copernicus?), it’s getting a mixed reception. People are uncomfortable to have a play within a book. Just not as uncomfortable as they were to have a sun withing the center of the solar system.
“The highlight of this undertaking for me was to make a trip to Poland and see the actual MS of Copernicus’ book. Now it’s kept safe (as he would have wanted). You go into a little room. A table sits in the center of the room, spread with a white tablecloth. The curator, wearing gloves, opens the book. And there, as it was drawn by him 500 years ago, is the iconic drawing of the heliocentric universe – it was the Universe then – as Copernicus inked it. I was stunned to note that there was a hole in the MS, right in the middle of the drawing. It is where Copernicus placed the point of his compasses to create the concentric circles where he would place the planets around the sun.”
Q & A
Q. You (Gleick) mention at the end of your book about information storage becoming aware of itself. Care to compare that to the lack of awareness in politics?
A. (Gleick) We live is a flood of information, mis- and dis- information. The final paradox is while information moves more freely now and is more widely available to people than ever in human history, that also allows for more crazy ideas to persist and seem to overwhelm factual information. This is worrying but not, finally, devastating. I remain optimistic to the condition without really being able to justify my optimism.
A. (Sobel) After giving a presentation on my book some weeks ago, everyone left the venue to return to their cars where they found a leaflet that had been placed under their wiper blades. The leaflet said, "Find out the REAL truth about Copernicus, promoter of heresy. Go to such-and-such a website, etc. The "real truth"? What is that?
Q. Do you envision such a thing as product liability laws for information?
A. (Gleick) I believe we have them -- libel and slander laws.
Q. 1948 is the date you chose for the beginning of the Information Age, yet history of the written word may be 5000 years old. What forms did it exist in?
A. (Gleick) History doesn't come into existence until the invention of the written word -- the begining of recorded history. It's not completely possible to put ourselves in the mind of people who existed before writing existed. Before math and logic existed. We only had stories and chronologies -- only oral traditions. People knew nothing of their pasts beyond the reach of their own grandparents, and often not even that far. For historians, this represents an event horizon we can't see past.
Q. Your thoughts on the singularity (as discussed in the book)?
A. (Gleick) The singularity -- unlike in Cosmology -- is a critical point beyond which the machine takes over. I'm not terrified of that eventuality; I believe we'll be so attached to our devices, machines, that we won't feel bad about it.
Q. Would you care to address Galileo, the Heretic?
A. (Sobel) The author argues that Galileo was tried because of his disagreement with the doctrine of transubstantiation. I don't agree. Transcripts of his trial exist and they show pretty clearly that Galileo was tried for disobedience -- he wrote his book in defiance of the Church proscription that he do not.
Q. Please talk about how information becomes accepted as truth, or not, as in the case of Global Warming deniers.
A. (Gleick) The powerful role of the book beyond a storage device and its effectiveness as a spreader of information is a third thing. A book guarantees that anyone who picks it up will read exactly the same thing as anyone else who does. In the Printed Book Age, you had the certainty of that.
In our generation we're drifting away from that to a state of knowing that is more fluid. Yet, Wikipedia may not be any less accurate than Britannica. In a way, that supports skeptical deniers.
A. (Sobel) Part of the problem is the standard of proof is different for determining what is factual in science vs. other areas of life. Our problem is, if we require that standard of proof for Global Warming, a scientific theory, it will be too late. Copernicus did not have proof of his theory, still he published it and people accepted it because it was clearly the best explanation on offer. Galileo added evidence to buttress Copernicus' concept. When, years later, actual proof was demonstrated, it hardly made any noise; Copernicus' heliocentric model was already the accepted one.
A. cont. (Gleick) Science is not about absolute proof; it's about asking questions and about uncertainties. This makes some people uncomfortable.
Q. My partner is a newly minted librarian. We're wondering -- is he a dinosaur? My second question. . . do either of you save drafts of your work?
A. (Sobel) I don't any more, not even digitally.
(Gleick) I run one draft on the computer and my sub drafts flow into it, one into the next. For your friend the librarian, don't worry. They will become more important as conductors of information.
The closing tidbit was a reference to an interesting website,Quora, which is devoted to how to understand fact.
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