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7. INFORMATION THEORY
♦ “PERHAPS COMING UP WITH A THEORY”: Jon Barwise, “Information and Circumstance,” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 27, no. 3 (1986): 324.
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♦ SAID NOTHING TO EACH OTHER ABOUT THEIR WORK: Shannon interview with Robert Price: “A Conversation with Claude Shannon: One Man’s Approach to Problem Solving,” IEEE Communications Magazine 22 (1984): 125; cf. Alan Turing to Claude Shannon, 3 June 1953, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
♦ “NO, I’M NOT INTERESTED IN DEVELOPING A POWERFUL BRAIN”: Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (London: Vintage, 1992), 251.
♦ “A CONFIRMED SOLITARY”: Max H. A. Newman to Alonzo Church, 31 May 1936, quoted in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing, 113.
♦ “THE JUSTIFICATION … LIES IN THE FACT”: Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 42 (1936): 230–65.
♦ “IT WAS ONLY BY TURING’S WORK”: Kurt Gödel to Ernest Nagel, 1957, in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, vol. 5, ed. Solomon Feferman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 147.
♦ “YOU SEE … THE FUNNY LITTLE ROUNDS”: letter from Alan Turing to his mother and father, summer 1923, AMT/K/1/3, Turing Digital Archive, http://www.turingarchive.org.
♦ “IN ELEMENTARY ARITHMETIC THE TWO-DIMENSIONAL CHARACTER”: Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers,” 230–65.
♦ “THE THING HINGES ON GETTING THIS HALTING INSPECTOR”: “On the Seeming Paradox of Mechanizing Creativity,” in Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 535.
♦ “IT USED TO BE SUPPOSED IN SCIENCE”: “The Nature of Spirit,” unpublished essay, 1932, in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing, 63.
♦ “ONE CAN PICTURE AN INDUSTRIOUS AND DILIGENT CLERK”: Herbert B. Enderton, “Elements of Recursion Theory,” in Jon Barwise, Handbook of Mathematical Logic (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1977), 529.
♦ “A LOT OF PARTICULAR AND INTERESTING CODES”: Alan Turing to Sara Turing, 14 October 1936, quoted in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing, 120.
♦ “THE ENEMY KNOWS THE SYSTEM BEING USED”: “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems” (1948), in Claude Elwood Shannon, Collected Papers, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), 90.
♦ “FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE CRYPTANALYST”: Ibid., 113.
♦ “THE MERE SOUNDS OF SPEECH”: Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), 21.
♦ “D MEASURES, IN A SENSE, HOW MUCH A TEXT”: “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems,” in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 85.
♦ “THE ENEMY IS NO BETTER OFF”: Ibid., 97.
♦ “THE ‘MEANING’ OF A MESSAGE IS GENERALLY IRRELEVANT”: “Communication Theory—Exposition of Fundamentals,” IRE Transactions on Information Theory, no. 1 (February 1950), in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 173.
♦ “WHAT GIBBS DID FOR PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY”: Warren Weaver letter to Claude Shannon, 27 January 1949, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
♦ “SOMETHING OF A DELAYED ACTION BOMB”: John R. Pierce, “The Early Days of Information Theory,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 19, no. 1 (1973): 4.
♦ “THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM OF COMMUNICATION”: Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), 31.
♦ “THIS IS ALREADY DONE TO A LIMITED EXTENT”: Ibid., 11.
♦ LANDMARK 1943 PAPER: “Stochastic Problems in Physics and Astronomy,” Reviews of Modern Physics 15, no. 1 (January 1943), 1.
♦ BOOK NEWLY PUBLISHED FOR SUCH PURPOSES: M. G. Kendall and B. Babbington Smith, Table of Random Sampling Numbers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939). Kendall and Smith used a “randomizing machine”—a rotating disc with the ten digits illuminated at irregular intervals by a neon light. An earlier effort, by L. H. C. Tippett in 1927, drew 41,000 digits from population census reports, also noting only the last digit of any number. A slightly naïve article in the Mathematical Gazette argued in 1944 that machines were unnecessary: “In a modern community, there is, it seems, no need to construct a randomising machine, for so many features of sociological life exhibit randomness.… Thus a set of random numbers serviceable for all ordinary purposes can be constructed by reading the registration numbers of cars as they pass us in the street, for cars though numbered serially move about the streets in non-serial fashion, obvious errors, such as those of reading the numbers seen every morning on the way to the station along one’s own road when Mr. Smith’s car is always standing outside No. 49 being, of course, avoided.” Frank Sandon, “Random Sampling Numbers,” The Mathematical Gazette 28 (December 1944): 216.
♦ TABLES CONSTRUCTED FOR USE BY CODE BREAKERS: Fletcher Pratt, Secret and Urgent: The Story of Codes and Ciphers (Garden City, N.Y.: Blue Ribbon, 1939).
♦ “HOW MUCH ‘CHOICE’ IS INVOLVED”: Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 18.
♦ “BINARY DIGITS, OR MORE BRIEFLY, BITS”: “A word suggested by J. W. Tukey,” he added. John Tukey, the statistician, had been a roommate of Richard Feynman’s at Princeton and spent some time working at Bell Labs after the war.
♦ “MORE ERRATIC AND UNCERTAIN”: Claude Shannon, “Prediction and Entropy of Printed English,” Bell System Technical Journal 30 (1951): 50, in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 94.
♦ “TO MAKE THE CHANCE OF ERROR”: quoted in M. Mitchell Waldrop, “Reluctant Father of the Digital Age,” Technology Review (July–August 2001): 64–71.
♦ “IT’S A SOLID-STATE AMPLIFIER”: Shannon interview with Anthony Liversidge, Omni (August 1987), in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, xxiii.
♦ “BITS STORAGE CAPACITY”: Handwritten note, 12 July 1949, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
8. THE INFORMATIONAL TURN
♦ “IT IS PROBABLY DANGEROUS TO USE THIS THEORY”: Heinz von Foerster, ed., Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems: Transactions of the Seventh Conference, March 23–24, 1950 (New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1951), 155.
♦ “AND IT IS NOT ALWAYS CLEAR”: J. J. Doob, review (untitled), Mathematical Reviews 10 (February 1949): 133.
♦ “AT FIRST GLANCE, IT MIGHT APPEAR”: A. Chapanis, review (untitled), Quarterly Review of Biology 26, no. 3 (September 1951): 321.
♦ “SHANNON DEVELOPS A CONCEPT OF INFORMATION”: Arthur W. Burks, review (untitled), Philosophical Review 60, no. 3 (July 1951): 398.
♦ SHORT REVIEW OF WIENER’S BOOK: Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 37 (1949), in Claude Elwood Shannon, Collected Papers, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), 872.
♦ “WIENER’S HEAD WAS FULL”: John R. Pierce, “The Early Days of Information Theory,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 19, no. 1 (1973): 5.
♦ THE WORD HE TOOK FROM THE GREEK: André-Marie Ampère had used the word, cybernétics, in 1834 (Essai sur la philosophie des sciences).
♦ “A LAD WHO HAS BEEN PROUDLY TERMED”: “Boy of 14 College Graduate,” The New York Times, 9 May 1909, 1.
♦ “AN INFANT PRODIGY NAMED WIENER”: Bertrand Russell to Lucy Donnelly, 19 October 1913, quoted in Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), 18.
♦ “HE IS AN ICEBERG”: Norbert Wiener to Leo Wiener, 15 October 1913, quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Weiner, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 30.
♦ “WE ARE SWIMMING UPSTREAM AGAINST A GREAT TORRENT”: Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964), 324.
♦ “A NEW INTERPRETATION OF MAN”: Ibid., 375.
♦ “ANY CHANGE OF AN ENTITY”: Arturo Rosenblueth et al., “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,” Philosophy of Science 10 (1943): 18.
♦ “THAT IT WAS NOT SOME PARTICULAR PHYSICAL THING”: Quoted in Warren S. McCulloch, “Recollections of the Many Sources of Cybernetics,” ASC Forum 6, no. 2 (1974).
♦ “THEY ARE GROWING WITH FEARFUL SPEED”: “In Man’s Image,” Time, 27 December 1948.
♦ “THE ALGEBRA OF LOGIC PAR EXCELLENCE”: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961), 118.
♦ “TRAFFIC PROBLEMS AND OVERLOADING”: Ibid., 132.
♦ “FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE”: Warren S. McCulloch, “Through the Den of the Metaphysician,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 5, no. 17 (1954): 18.
♦ A NOAH’S ARK RULE: Warren S. McCulloch, “Recollections of the Many Sources of Cybernetics,” 11.
♦ WIENER TOLD THEM THAT ALL THESE SCIENCES: Steve J. Heims, The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 22.
♦ “THE SUBJECT AND THE GROUP”: Heinz von Foerster, ed., Transactions of the Seventh Conference, 11.
♦ “TO SAY, AS THE PUBLIC PRESS SAYS”: Ibid., 12.
♦ “I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO PREVENT THESE REPORTS”: Ibid., 18.
♦ IT WAS, AT BOTTOM, A PERFECTLY ORDINARY SITUATION: Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 89.
♦ COULD PROPERLY BE DESCRIBED AS ANALOG OR DIGITAL: Heinz von Foerster, ed., Transactions of the Seventh Conference, 13.
♦ “THE STATE OF THE NERVE CELL WITH NO MESSAGE IN IT”: Ibid., 20.
♦ “IN THIS WORLD IT SEEMS BEST”: Warren S. McCulloch and John Pfeiffer, “Of Digital Computers Called Brains,” Scientific Monthly 69, no. 6 (1949): 368.
♦ HE WAS WORKING ON AN IDEA FOR QUANTIZING SPEECH: J. C. R. Licklider, interview by William Aspray and Arthur Norberg, 28 October 1988, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, http://special.lib.umn.edu/cbi/oh/pdf.phtml?id=180 (accessed 6 June 2010).
♦ “MATHEMATICIANS ARE ALWAYS DOING THAT”: Heinz von Foerster, ed., Transactions of the Seventh Conference, 66.
♦ “YES!” INTERRUPTED WIENER: Ibid., 92.
♦ “IF YOU TALK ABOUT ANOTHER KIND OF INFORMATION”: Ibid., 100.
♦ “IT MIGHT, FOR EXAMPLE, BE A RANDOM SEQUENCE”: Ibid., 123.
♦ “I WOULDN’T CALL THAT RANDOM, WOULD YOU? ”: Ibid., 135.
♦ “I WANTED TO CALL THE WHOLE”: quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age, 189.
♦ “I’M THINKING OF THE OLD MAYA TEXTS”: Heinz von Foerster, ed., Transactions of the Seventh Conference, 143.
♦ “INFORMATION CAN BE CONSIDERED AS ORDER”: Heinz von Foerster, ed., Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems: Transactions of the Eighth Conference, March 15–16, 1951 (New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1952), xiii.
♦ HIS NEIGHBOR SAID: Heinz von Foerster, ed., Transactions of the Seventh Conference, 151.
♦ “WHEN THE MACHINE WAS TURNED OFF”: Heinz von Foerster, ed., Transactions of the Eighth Conference, 173.
♦ “IT BUILDS UP A COMPLETE PATTERN OF INFORMATION”: “Computers and Automata,” in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 706.
♦ “WHEN IT ARRIVES AT A, IT REMEMBERS”: Heinz von Foerster, ed. Transactions of the Eighth Conference, 175.
♦ “LIKE A MAN WHO KNOWS THE TOWN”: Ibid., 180.
♦ “IN REALITY IT IS THE MAZE WHICH REMEMBERS”: Quoted in Roberto Cordeschi, The Discovery of the Artificial: Behavior, Mind, and Machines Before and Beyond Cybernetics (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2002), 163.
♦ FOUND RESEARCHERS TO BE “WELL-INFORMED”: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, 23.
♦ “ABOUT FIFTEEN PEOPLE WHO HAD WIENER’S IDEAS”: John Bates to Grey Walter, quoted in Owen Holland, “The First Biologically Inspired Robots,” Robotica 21 (2003): 354.
♦ HALF PRONOUNCED IT RAY-SHE-OH: Philip Husbands and Owen Holland, “The Ratio Club: A Hub of British Cybernetics,” in The Mechanical Mind in History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 103.
♦ “A BRAIN CONSISTING OF RANDOMLY CONNECTED IMPRESSIONAL SYNAPSES”: Ibid., 110.
♦ “THINK OF THE BRAIN AS A TELEGRAPHIC RELAY”: “Brain and Behavior,” Comparative Psychology Monograph, Series 103 (1950), in Warren S. McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), 307.
♦ “I PROPOSE TO CONSIDER THE QUESTION”: Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Minds and Machines 59, no. 236 (1950): 433–60.
♦ “THE PRESENT INTEREST IN ‘THINKING MACHINES’ ”: Ibid., 436.
♦ “SINCE BABBAGE’S MACHINE WAS NOT ELECTRICAL”: Ibid., 439.
♦ “IN THE CASE THAT THE FORMULA IS NEITHER PROVABLE NOR DISPROVABLE”: Alan M. Turing, “Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory,” unpublished lecture, c. 1951, in Stuart M. Shieber, ed., The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 105.
♦ THE ORIGINAL QUESTION, “CAN MACHINES THINK?”: Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 442.
♦ “THE IDEA OF A MACHINE THINKING”: Claude Shannon to C. Jones, 16 June 1952, Manuscript Div., Library of Congress, by permission of Mary E. Shannon.
♦ “PSYCHOLOGIE IS A DOCTRINE WHICH SEARCHES OUT”: Translated in William Harvey, Anatomical Exercises Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood (London, 1653), quoted in “psychology, n,” draft revision Dec. 2009, OED Online, Oxford University Press, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50191636.
♦ “THE SCIENCE OF MIND, IF IT CAN BE CALLED A SCIENCE”: North British Review 22 (November 1854), 181.
♦ “A LOATHSOME, DISTENDED, TUMEFIED, BLOATED, DROPSICAL MASS”: William James to Henry Holt, 9 May 1890, quoted in Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 298.
♦ “YOU TALK ABOUT MEMORY”: George Miller, dialogue with Jonathan Miller, in Jonathan Miller, States of Mind (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 22.
♦ “NEW CONCEPTS OF THE NATURE AND MEASURE”: Homer Jacobson, “The Informational Capacity of the Human Ear,” Science 112 (4 August 1950): 143–44; “The Informational Capacity of the Human Eye,” Science 113 (16 March 1951): 292–93.
♦ A GROUP IN 1951 TESTED THE LIKELIHOOD: G. A. Miller, G. A. Heise, and W. Lichten, “The Intelligibility of Speech as a Function of the Context of the Test Materials,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 41 (1951): 329–35.
♦ “THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A DESCRIPTION”: Donald E. Broadbent, Perception and Communication (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1958), 31.
♦ “THE MAGICAL NUMBER SEVEN”: Psychological Review 63 (1956): 81–97.
♦ “THOSE WHO TAKE THE INFORMATIONAL TURN”: Frederick Adams, “The Informational Turn in Philosophy,” Minds and Machines 13 (2003): 495.
♦ THE MIND CAME IN ON THE BACK: Jonathan Miller, States of Mind, 26.
♦ “I THINK THAT THIS PRESENT CENTURY”: Claude Shannon, “The Transfer of Information,” talk presented at the 75th anniversary of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Reprinted by permission of Mary E. Shannon.
♦ “OUR FELLOW SCIENTISTS IN MANY DIFFERENT FIELDS”: “The Bandwagon,” in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 462.
♦ “OUR CONSENSUS HAS NEVER BEEN UNANIMOUS”: quoted in Steve J. Heims, The Cybernetics Group, 277.
♦ THIS WAS CHANGED FOR PUBLICATION: Notes by Neil J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 882.
♦ “OF COURSE, IS OF NO IMPORTANCE”: Claude E. Shannon, “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess,” first presented at National IRE Convention, 9 March 1949, in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 637; and “A Chess-Playing Machine,” Scientific American (February 1950), in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 657.
♦ VISITED THE AMERICAN CHAMPION: Edward Lasker to Claude Shannon, 7 February 1949, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
♦ “LEARNING CHESS PLAYER”: Claude Shannon to C. J. S. Purdy, 28 August 1952, Manuscript Div., Library of Congress, by permission of Mary E. Shannon.
♦ SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF JUGGLING: Unpublished, in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 861. The actual lines, from Cummings’s poem “voices to voices, lip to lip,” are: “who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch / invents an instrument to measure Spring with?”
♦ A MACHINE THAT WOULD REPAIR ITSELF: Claude Shannon to Irene Angus, 8 August 1952, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
♦ “WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU SWITCH ON ONE OF THESE MECHANICAL COMPUTERS”: Robert McCraken, “The Sinister Machines,” Wyoming Tribune, March 1954.
♦ “INFORMATION THEORY, PHOTOSYNTHESIS, AND RELIGION”: Peter Elias, “Two Famous Papers,” IRE Transactions on Information Theory 4, no. 3 (1958): 99.
♦ “WE HAVE HEARD OF ‘ENTROPIES’ ”: E. Colin Cherry, On Human Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1957), 214.
9. ENTROPY AND ITS DEMONS
♦ “THOUGHT INTERFERES WITH THE PROBABILITY OF EVENTS”: David L. Watson, “Entropy and Organization,” Science 72 (1930): 222.
♦ THE RUMOR AT BELL LABS: Robert Price, “A Conversation with Claude Shannon: One Man’s Approach to Problem Solving,” IEEE Communications Magazine 22 (1984): 124.
♦ “THE THEORETICAL STUDY OF THE STEAM ENGINE”: For example, J. Johnstone, “Entropy and Evolution,” Philosophy 7 (July 1932): 287.
♦ MAXWELL TURNED ABOUT-FACE: James Clerk Maxwell, Theory of Heat, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1872), 186; 8th edition (London: Longmans, Green, 1891), 189 n.
♦ “YOU CAN’T WIN”: Peter Nicholls and David Langford, eds., The Science in Science Fiction (New York: Knopf, 1983), 86.
♦ “ALTHOUGH MECHANICAL ENERGY IS INDESTRUCTIBLE”: Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), “Physical Considerations Regarding the Possible Age of the Sun’s Heat,” lecture at the Meeting of the British Association at Manchester, September 1861, in Philosophical Magazine 152 (February 1862): 158.
♦ “IN CONSIDERING THE CONVERSION OF PSYCHICAL ENERGY”: Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” 1918b, 116, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1955).
♦ “CONFUSION, LIKE THE CORRELATIVE TERM ORDER”: James Clerk Maxwell, “Diffusion,” written for the ninth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, in The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. W. D. Niven, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890; repr. New York: Dover, 1965), 646.
♦ “TIME FLOWS ON, NEVER COMES BACK”: Léon Brillouin, “Life, Thermodynamics, and Cybernetics” (1949), in Harvey S. Leff and Andrew F. Rex, eds., Maxwell’s Demon 2: Entropy, Classical and Quantum Information, Computing (Bristol, U.K.: Institute of Physics, 2003), 77.
♦ “THE ACCIDENTS OF LIFE”: Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 106.
♦ “MORAL. THE 2ND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS”: James Clerk Maxwell to John William Strutt, 6 December 1870, in Elizabeth Garber, Stephen G. Brush, and C. W. F. Everitt, eds., Maxwell on Heat and Statistical Mechanics: On “Avoiding All Personal Enquiries” of Molecules (London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 205.
♦ “THE ODDS AGAINST A PIECE OF CHALK”: Quoted by Andrew Hodges, “What Did Alan Turing Mean by ‘Machine,’?” in Philip Husbands et al., The Mechanical Mind in History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 81.
♦ “AND YET NO WORK HAS BEEN DONE”: James Clerk Maxwell to Peter Guthrie Tait, 11 December 1867, in The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. P. M. Harman, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 332.
♦ “HE DIFFERS FROM REAL LIVING ANIMALS”: Royal Institution Lecture, 28 February 1879, Proceedings of the Royal Institution 9 (1880): 113, in William Thomson, Mathematical and Physical Papers, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 21.
♦ “INFINITE SWARMS OF ABSURD LITTLE MICROSCOPIC IMPS”: “Editor’s Table,” Popular Science Monthly 15 (1879): 412.
♦ “CLERK MAXWELL’S DEMON”: Henry Adams to Brooks Adams, 2 May 1903, in Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters, ed. Harold Cater (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 545.
♦ “INFINITELY SUBTILE SENSES”: Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science, trans. George Bruce Halsted (New York: Science Press, 1913), 152.
♦ “NOW WE MUST NOT INTRODUCE DEMONOLOGY”: James Johnstone, The Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 118.
♦ “IF WE VIEW THE EXPERIMENTING MAN”: Leó Szilárd, “On the Decrease of Entropy in a Thermodynamic System by the Intervention of Intelligent Beings,” trans. Anatol Rapoport and Mechthilde Knoller, from Leó Szilárd, “Über Die Entropieverminderung in Einem Thermodynamischen System Bei Eingriffen Intelligenter Wesen,” Zeitschrift für Physik 53 (1929): 840–56, in Harvey S. Leff and Andrew F. Rex, eds., Maxwell’s Demon 2, 111.
♦ “THINKING GENERATES ENTROPY”: Quoted in William Lanouette, Genius in the Shadows (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 64.
♦ “I THINK ACTUALLY SZILÁRD”: Shannon interview with Friedrich-Wilhelm Hagemeyer, 1977, quoted in Erico Mariu Guizzo, “The Essential Message: Claude Shannon and the Making of Information Theory” (Master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004).
♦ “I CONSIDER HOW MUCH INFORMATION IS PRODUCED”: Claude Shannon to Norbert Wiener, 13 October 1948, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Archives.
♦ “THAT SOME OF US SHOULD VENTURE TO EMBARK”: Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?, reprint ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1.
♦ “SCHRÖDINGER’S BOOK BECAME A KIND OF UNCLE TOM’S CABIN”: Gunther S. Stent, “That Was the Molecular Biology That Was,” Science 160, no. 3826 (1968): 392.
♦ “WHEN IS A PIECE OF MATTER SAID TO BE ALIVE?”: Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?, 69.
♦ “THE STABLE STATE OF AN ENZYME”: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961), 58.
♦ “TO PUT IT LESS PARADOXICALLY”: Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?, 71.
♦ “A COMPLETE (DOUBLE) COPY OF THE CODE-SCRIPT”: Ibid., 23.
♦ “IT SEEMS NEITHER ADEQUATE NOR POSSIBLE”: Ibid., 28.
♦ “WE BELIEVE A GENE—OR PERHAPS THE WHOLE CHROMOSOME FIBER”: Ibid., 61.
♦ “THE DIFFERENCE IN STRUCTURE”: Ibid., 5 (my emphasis).
♦ “THE LIVING ORGANISM HEALS ITS OWN WOUNDS”: Léon Brillouin, “Life, Thermodynamics, and Cybernetics,” 84.
♦ HE WROTE THIS IN 1950: Léon Brillouin, “Maxwell’s Demon Cannot Operate: Information and Entropy,” in Harvey S. Leff and Andrew F. Rex, eds., Maxwell’s Demon 2, 123.
♦ “MAXWELL’S DEMON DIED AT THE AGE OF 62”: Peter T. Landsberg, The Enigma of Time (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1982), 15.
10. LIFE’S OWN CODE
♦ “WHAT LIES AT THE HEART OF EVERY LIVING THING”: Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1986), 112.
♦ “THE BIOLOGIST MUST BE ALLOWED”: W. D. Gunning, “Progression and Retrogression,” The Popular Science Monthly 8 (December 1875): 189, n1.
♦ “THE MOST NAÏVE AND OLDEST CONCEPTION”: Wilhelm Johannsen, “The Genotype Conception of Heredity,” American Naturalist 45, no. 531 (1911): 130.
♦ IT MUST BE QUANTIZED: “Discontinuity and constant differences between the ‘genes’ are the quotidian bread of Mendelism,” American Naturalist 45, no. 531 (1911): 147.
♦ “THE MINIATURE CODE SHOULD PRECISELY CORRESPOND”: Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?, reprint ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 62.
♦ SOME OF THE PHYSICISTS NOW TURNING TO BIOLOGY: Henry Quastler, ed., Essays on the Use of Information Theory in Biology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953).
♦ “A LINEAR CODED TAPE OF INFORMATION”: Sidney Dancoff to Henry Quastler, 31 July 1950, quoted in Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life: A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 119.
♦ NUMBER OF BITS REPRESENTED BY A SINGLE BACTERIUM: Henry Linschitz, “The Information Content of a Bacterial Cell,” in Henry Quastler, ed., Essays on the Use of Information Theory in Biology, 252.
♦ “HYPOTHETICAL INSTRUCTIONS TO BUILD AN ORGANISM”: Sidney Dancoff and Henry Quastler, “The Information Content and Error Rate of Living Things,” in Henry Quastler, ed., Essays on the Use of Information Theory in Biology, 264.
♦ “THE ESSENTIAL COMPLEXITY OF A SINGLE CELL”: Ibid., 270.
♦ AN ODD LITTLE LETTER: Boris Ephrussi, Urs Leopold, J. D. Watson, and J. J. Weigle, “Terminology in Bacterial Genetics,” Nature 171 (18 April 1953): 701.
♦ MEANT AS A JOKE: Cf. Sahotra Sarkar, Molecular Models of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005); Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?, 58; Harriett Ephrussi-Taylor to Joshua Lederberg, 3 September 1953, and Lederberg annotation 30 April 2004, in Lederberg papers, http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/BB/A/J/R/R/ (accessed 22 January 2009); and James D. Watson, Genes, Girls, and Gamow: After the Double Helix (New York: Knopf, 2002), 12.
♦ GENES MIGHT LIE IN A DIFFERENT SUBSTANCE: In retrospect, everyone understood that this had been proven in 1944, by Oswald Avery at Rockefeller University. Not many researchers were convinced at the time, however.
♦ “ONE OF THE MOST COY STATEMENTS”: Gunther S. Stent, “DNA,” Daedalus 99 (1970): 924.
♦ “IT HAS NOT ESCAPED OUR NOTICE”: James D. Watson and Francis Crick, “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” Nature 171 (1953): 737.
♦ “IT FOLLOWS THAT IN A LONG MOLECULE”: James D. Watson and Francis Crick, “Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid,” Nature 171 (1953): 965.
♦ “DEAR DRS. WATSON & CRICK”: George Gamow to James D. Watson and Francis Crick, 8 July 1953, quoted in Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?, 131. Reprinted by permission of R. Igor Gamow.
♦ “AS IN THE BREAKING OF ENEMY MESSAGES”: George Gamow to E. Chargaff, 6 May 1954, Ibid., 141.
♦ “BY PRIVATE INTERNATIONAL BUSH TELEGRAPH”: Gunther S. Stent, “DNA,” 924.
♦ “PEOPLE DIDN’T NECESSARILY BELIEVE IN THE CODE”: Francis Crick, interview with Horace Freeland Judson, 20 November 1975, in Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 233.
♦ “A LONG NUMBER WRITTEN IN A FOUR-DIGITAL SYSTEM”: George Gamow, “Possible Relation Between Deoxyribonucleic Acid and Protein Structures,” Nature 173 (1954): 318.
♦ “BETWEEN THE COMPLEX MACHINERY IN A LIVING CELL”: Douglas R. Hofstadter, “The Genetic Code: Arbitrary?” (March 1982), in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 671.
♦ “THE NUCLEUS OF A LIVING CELL IS A STOREHOUSE OF INFORMATION”: George Gamow, “Information Transfer in the Living Cell,” Scientific American 193, no. 10 (October 1955): 70.
♦ UNNECESSARY IF SOME TRIPLETS MADE “SENSE”: Francis Crick, “General Nature of the Genetic Code for Proteins,” Nature 192 (30 December 1961): 1227.
♦ “THE SEQUENCE OF NUCLEOTIDES AS AN INFINITE MESSAGE”: Solomon W. Golomb, Basil Gordon, and Lloyd R. Welch, “Comma-Free Codes,” Canadian Journal of Mathematics 10 (1958): 202–209, quoted in Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?, 171.
♦ “ONCE ‘INFORMATION’ HAS PASSED INTO PROTEIN”: Francis Crick, “On Protein Synthesis,” Symposium of the Society for Experimental Biology 12 (1958): 152; Cf. Francis Crick, “Central Dogma of Molecular Biology,” Nature 227 (1970): 561–63; and Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 20–21.
♦ “THE COMPLETE DESCRIPTION OF THE ORGANISM”: Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation, 219–21.
♦ “IT IS IN THIS SENSE THAT ALL WORKING GENETICISTS”: Gunther S. Stent, “You Can Take the Ethics Out of Altruism But You Can’t Take the Altruism Out of Ethics,” Hastings Center Report 7, no. 6 (1977): 34; and Gunther S. Stent, “DNA,” 925.
♦ “IT DEPENDS UPON WHAT LEVEL”: Seymour Benzer, “The Elementary Units of Heredity,” in W. D. McElroy and B. Glass, eds., The Chemical Basis of Heredity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), 70.
♦ “THIS ATTITUDE IS AN ERROR OF GREAT PROFUNDITY”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 237.
♦ “WE ARE SURVIVAL MACHINES”: Ibid., xxi.
♦ “THEY ARE PAST MASTERS OF THE SURVIVAL ARTS”: Ibid., 19.
♦ “ENGLISH BIOLOGIST RICHARD DAWKINS HAS RECENTLY RAISED”: Stephen Jay Gould, “Caring Groups and Selfish Genes,” in The Panda’s Thumb (New York: Norton, 1980), 86.
♦ “A THIRTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD STUDENT OF ANIMAL BEHAVIOR”: Gunther S. Stent, “You Can Take the Ethics Out of Altruism But You Can’t Take the Altruism Out of Ethics,” 33.
♦ “EVERY CREATURE MUST BE ALLOWED TO ‘RUN’ ITS OWN DEVELOPMENT”: Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (London: Trübner & Co, 1878), 134.
♦ “A SCHOLAR … IS JUST A LIBRARY’S WAY”: Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 346.
♦ “ANTHROPOCENTRISM IS A DISABLING VICE OF THE INTELLECT”: Edward O. Wilson, “Biology and the Social Sciences,” Daedalus 106, no. 4 (Fall 1977), 131.
♦ “IT REQUIRES A DELIBERATE MENTAL EFFORT”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 265.
♦ “MIGHT ENSURE ITS SURVIVAL BY TENDING TO ENDOW”: Ibid., 36.
♦ “THEY DO NOT PLAN AHEAD”: Ibid., 25.
♦ “THERE IS A MOLECULAR ARCHEOLOGY IN THE MAKING”: Werner R. Loewenstein, The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication, and the Foundations of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93–94.
♦ “SELECTION FAVORS THOSE GENES WHICH SUCCEED”: Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 117.
♦ DAWKINS SUGGESTS THE CASE OF A GENE: Ibid., 196–97.
♦ THERE IS NO GENE FOR LONG LEGS: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 37.
♦ HABIT OF SAYING “A GENE FOR X”: Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, 21.
♦ “ALL WE WOULD NEED IN ORDER”: Ibid., 23.
♦ “ANY GENE THAT INFLUENCES THE DEVELOPMENT OF NERVOUS SYSTEMS”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 60.
♦ “IT IS NO MORE LIKELY TO DIE”: Ibid., 34.
♦ “TODAY THE TENDENCY IS TO SAY”: Max Delbrück, “A Physicist Looks At Biology,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 38 (1949): 194.
11. INTO THE MEME POOL
♦ “WHEN I MUSE ABOUT MEMES”: Douglas R. Hofstadter, “On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures,” in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New York, Basic Books, 1985), 52.
♦ “NOW THROUGH THE VERY UNIVERSALITY OF ITS STRUCTURES”: Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Knopf, 1971), 145.
♦ “IDEAS HAVE RETAINED SOME OF THE PROPERTIES”: Ibid., 165.
♦ “IDEAS CAUSE IDEAS”: Roger Sperry, “Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values,” in New Views of the Nature of Man, ed. John R. Platt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 82.
♦ “I THINK THAT A NEW KIND”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 192.
♦ “THIS MAY NOT BE WHAT GEORGE WASHINGTON LOOKED LIKE THEN”: Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 347.
♦ “A WAGON WITH SPOKED WHEELS”: Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 204.
♦ “GENES CANNOT BE SELFISH”: Mary Midgley, “Gene-Juggling,” Philosophy 54 (October 1979).
♦ “A MEME … IS AN INFORMATION PACKET”: Daniel C. Dennett, “Memes: Myths, Misunderstandings, and Misgivings,” draft for Chapel Hill lecture, October 1998, http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/MEMEMYTH.FIN.htm (accessed 7 June 2010).
♦ “TO DIE FOR AN IDEA”: George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, “Clinical Notes,” American Mercury 3, no. 9 (September 1924), 55.
♦ I WAS PROMISED ON A TIME TO HAVE REASON FOR MY RHYME: Edmund Spenser, quoted by Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (London: 1662).
♦ “I BELIEVE THAT, GIVEN THE RIGHT CONDITIONS”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 322.
♦ “WHEN YOU PLANT A FERTILE MEME”: Quoted by Dawkins, Ibid., 192.
♦ “HARD AS THIS TERM MAY BE TO DELIMIT”: W. D. Hamilton, “The Play by Nature,” Science 196 (13 May 1977): 759.
♦ BIRDSONG CULTURE: Juan D. Delius, “Of Mind Memes and Brain Bugs, A Natural History of Culture,” in The Nature of Culture, ed. Walter A. Koch (Bochum, Germany: Bochum, 1989), 40.
♦ “FROM LOOK TO LOOK”: James Thomson, “Autumn” (1730).
♦ “EVE, WHOSE EYE”: John Milton, Paradise Lost, IX:1036.
♦ WALTON PROPOSED SIMPLE SELF-REPLICATING SENTENCES: Douglas R. Hofstadter, “On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures,” 52.
♦ “I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU”: Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 346.
♦ “THE COMPUTERS IN WHICH MEMES LIVE”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 197.
♦ “IT WAS OBVIOUSLY PREDICTABLE”: Ibid., 329.
♦ “MAKE SEVEN COPIES OF IT EXACTLY AS IT IS WRITTEN”: Daniel W. VanArsdale, “Chain Letter Evolution,” http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/chain-letter/evolution.html (accessed 8 June 2010).
♦ “AN UNUSUAL CHAIN-LETTER REACHED QUINCY”: Harry Middleton Hyatt, Folk-Lore from Adams County, Illinois, 2nd and rev. ed. (Hannibal, Mo.: Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation, 1965), 581.
♦ “THESE LETTERS HAVE PASSED FROM HOST TO HOST”: Charles H. Bennett, Ming Li, and Bin Ma, “Chain Letters and Evolutionary Histories,” Scientific American 288, no. 6 (June 2003): 77.
♦ FOR DENNETT, THE FIRST FOUR NOTES: Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 344.
♦ “MEMES HAVE NOT YET FOUND”: Richard Dawkins, foreword to Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xii.
♦ “THE HUMAN WORLD IS MADE OF STORIES”: David Mitchell, Ghostwritten (New York: Random House, 1999), 378.
♦ “AS WITH ALL KNOWLEDGE, ONCE YOU KNEW IT”: Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 170.
♦ “A LIFE POURED INTO WORDS”: John Updike, “The Author Observes His Birthday, 2005,” Endpoint and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 2009), 8.
♦ “IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS INFORMATION”: Fred I. Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), xii.
12. THE SENSE OF RANDOMNESS
♦ “I WONDER,” SHE SAID: Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005), 154.
♦ FOUND A MAGICAL LITTLE BOOK: Interviews, Gregory J. Chaitin, 27 October 2007 and 14 September 2009; Gregory J. Chaitin, “The Limits of Reason,” Scientific American 294, no. 3 (March 2006): 74.
♦ “ASTOUNDING AND MELANCHOLY”: Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Gödel’s Proof (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 6.
♦ “IT WAS A VERY SERIOUS CONCEPTUAL CRISIS”: quoted in Gregory J. Chaitin, Information, Randomness & Incompleteness: Papers on Algorithmic Information Theory (Singapore: World Scientific, 1987), 61.
♦ HE WONDERED IF AT SOME LEVEL: “Algorithmic Information Theory,” in Gregory J. Chaitin, Conversations with a Mathematician (London: Springer, 2002), 80.
♦ “PROBABILITY, LIKE TIME”: John Archibald Wheeler, At Home in the Universe, Masters of Modern Physics, vol. 9 (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1994), 304.
♦ WHETHER THE POPULATION OF FRANCE: Cf. John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Probability (London: Macmillan, 1921), 291.
♦ HE CHOSE THREE: KNOWLEDGE, CAUSALITY, AND DESIGN: Ibid., 281.
♦ “CHANCE IS ONLY THE MEASURE”: Henri Poincaré, “Chance,” in Science and Method, trans. Francis Maitland (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003), 65.
♦ 1009732533765201358634673548: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955).
♦ AN ELECTRONIC ROULETTE WHEEL: Ibid., ix–x.
♦ “STATE OF SIN”: Von Neumann quoted in Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 703.
♦ “WHEN THE READING HEAD MOVES”: “A Universal Turing Machine with Two Internal States,” in Claude Elwood Shannon, Collected Papers, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), 733–41.
♦ “HE SUMMARIZES HIS OBSERVATIONS”: Gregory J. Chaitin, “On the Length of Programs for Computing Finite Binary Sequences,” Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 13 (1966): 567.
♦ “WE ARE TO ADMIT NO MORE CAUSES”: Isaac Newton, “Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy; Rule I,” Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
♦ IN THE WANING YEARS OF TSARIST RUSSIA: Obituary, Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society 22 (1990): 31; A. N. Shiryaev, “Kolmogorov: Life and Creative Activities,” Annals of Probability 17, no. 3 (1989): 867.
♦ UNLIKELY TO ATTRACT INTERPRETATION: David A. Mindell et al., “Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union,” in Science and Ideology: A Comparative History, ed. Mark Walker (London: Routledge, 2003), 66 and 81.
♦ HE SOON LEARNED TO HIS SORROW: Cf. “Amount of Information and Entropy for Continuous Distributions,” note 1, in Selected Works of A. N. Kolmogorov, vol. 3, Information Theory and the Theory of Algorithms, trans. A. B. Sossinksky (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), 33.
♦ “MORE TECHNOLOGY THAN MATHEMATICS”: A. N. Kolmogorov and A. N.Shiryaev, Kolmogorov in Perspective, trans. Harold H. McFaden, History of Mathematics vol. 20 (n.p.: American Mathematical Society, London Mathematical Society, 2000), 54.
♦ “WHEN I READ THE WORKS OF ACADEMICIAN KOLMOGOROV”: Quoted in Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 58.
♦ “CYBERNETICS IN WIENER’S UNDERSTANDING”: “Intervention at the Session,” in Selected Works of A. N. Kolmogorov, 31.
♦ “AT EACH GIVEN MOMENT”: Kolmogorov diary entry, 14 September 1943, in A. N. Kolmogorov and A. N. Shiryaev, Kolmogorov in Perspective, 50.
♦ “IS IT POSSIBLE TO INCLUDE THIS NOVEL”: “Three Approaches to the Definition of the Concept ‘Quantity of Information,’ ” in Selected Works of A. N. Kolmogorov, 188.
♦ “OUR DEFINITION OF THE QUANTITY”: A. N. Kolmogorov, “Combinatorial Foundations of Information Theory and the Calculus of Probabilities,” Russian Mathematical Surveys 38, no. 4 (1983): 29–43.
♦ “THE INTUITIVE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ‘SIMPLE’ AND ‘COMPLICATED’ ”: “Three Approaches to the Definition of the Concept ‘Quantity of Information,’ ” Selected Works of A. N. Kolmogorov, 221.
♦ “A NEW CONCEPTION OF THE NOTION ‘RANDOM’”: “On the Logical Foundations of Information Theory and Probability Theory,” Problems of Information Transmission 5, no. 3 (1969): 1–4.
♦ HE DREAMED OF SPENDING HIS LAST YEARS: V. I. Arnold, “On A. N. Kolmogorov,” in A. N. Kolmogorov and A. N. Shiryaev, Kolmogorov in Perspective, 94.
♦ “THE PARADOX ORIGINALLY TALKS ABOUT ENGLISH”: Gregory J. Chaitin, Thinking About Gödel and Turing: Essays on Complexity, 1970–2007 (Singapore: World Scientific, 2007), 176.
♦ “IT DOESN’T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE WHICH PARADOX”: Gregory J. Chaitin, “The Berry Paradox,” Complexity 1, no. 1 (1995): 26; “Paradoxes of Randomness,” Complexity 7, no. 5 (2002): 14–21.
♦ “ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY IS LIKE GOD”: Interview, Gregory J. Chaitin, 14 September 2009.
♦ “GOD NOT ONLY PLAYS DICE”: Foreword to Cristian S. Calude, Information and Randomness: An Algorithmic Perspective (Berlin: Springer, 2002), viii.
♦ “CHARMINGLY CAPTURED THE ESSENCE”: Joseph Ford, “Directions in Classical Chaos,” in Directions in Chaos, ed. Hao Bai-lin (Singapore: World Scientific, 1987), 14.
♦ THE INFORMATION PACKING PROBLEM: Ray J. Solomonoff, “The Discovery of Algorithmic Probability,” Journal of Computer and System Sciences 55, no. 1 (1997): 73–88.
♦ “THREE MODELS FOR THE DESCRIPTION OF LANGUAGE”: Noam Chomsky, “Three Models for the Description of Language,” IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2, no. 3 (1956): 113–24.
♦ “THE LAWS OF SCIENCE THAT HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED”: Ray J. Solomonoff, “A Formal Theory of Inductive Inference,” Information and Control 7, no. 1 (1964): 1–22.
♦ “COCKTAIL SHAKER AND SHAKING VIGOROUSLY”: Foreword to Cristian S. Calude, Information and Randomness, vii.
♦ “IT IS PREFERABLE TO CONSIDER COMMUNICATION”: Gregory J. Chaitin, “Randomness and Mathematical Proof,” in Information, Randomness & Incompleteness, 4.
♦ “FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS OF INFORMATION THEORY”: Charles H. Bennett, “Logical Depth and Physical Complexity,” in The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey, ed. Rolf Herken (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 209–10.
13. INFORMATION IS PHYSICAL
♦ “THE MORE ENERGY, THE FASTER THE BITS FLIP”: Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe (New York: Knopf, 2006), 44.
♦ “HOW DID THIS COME ABOUT?”: Christopher A. Fuchs, “Quantum Mechanics as Quantum Information (and Only a Little More),” arXiv:quant-ph/0205039v1, 8 May 2002, 1.
♦ “THE REASON IS SIMPLE”: Ibid., 4.
♦ “IT TEACHES US … THAT SPACE CAN BE CRUMPLED”: John Archibald Wheeler with Kenneth Ford, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (New York: Norton, 1998), 298.
♦ “OTHERWISE PUT … EVERY IT”: “It from Bit” in John Archibald Wheeler, At Home in the Universe, Masters of Modern Physics, vol. 9 (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1994), 296.
♦ A PROBLEM AROSE WHEN STEPHEN HAWKING: Stephen Hawking, “Black Hole Explosions?” Nature 248 (1 March 1974), DOI:10.1038/248030a0, 30–31.
♦ PUBLISHING IT WITH A MILDER TITLE: Stephen Hawking, “The Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse,” Physical Review D 14 (1976): 2460–73; Gordon Belot et al., “The Hawking Information Loss Paradox: The Anatomy of a Controversy,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (1999): 189–229.
♦ “INFORMATION LOSS IS HIGHLY INFECTIOUS”: John Preskill, “Black Holes and Information: A Crisis in Quantum Physics,” Caltech Theory Seminar, 21 October 1994, http://www.theory.caltech.edu/~preskill/talks/blackholes.pdf (accessed 20 March 2010).
♦ “SOME PHYSICISTS FEEL THE QUESTION”: John Preskill, “Black Holes and the Information Paradox,” Scientific American (April 1997): 54.
♦ “I THINK THE INFORMATION PROBABLY GOES OFF”: Quoted in Tom Siegfried, The Bit and the Pendulum: From Quantum Computing to M Theory—The New Physics of Information (New York: Wiley and Sons, 2000), 203.
♦ “THERE IS NO BABY UNIVERSE”: Stephen Hawking, “Information Loss in Black Holes,” Physical Review D 72 (2005): 4.
♦ THE “THERMODYNAMICS OF COMPUTATION”: Charles H. Bennett, “Notes on the History of Reversible Computation,” IBM Journal of Research and Development 44 (2000): 270.
♦ “COMPUTERS … MAY BE THOUGHT OF AS ENGINES”: Charles H. Bennett, “The Thermodynamics of Computation—a Review,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21, no. 12 (1982): 906.
♦ BACK-OF-THE-ENVELOPE CALCULATION: Ibid.
♦ ROLF LANDAUER: “Information Is Physical,” Physics Today 23 (May 1991); “Information Is Inevitably Physical,” in Anthony H. G. Hey, ed., Feynman and Computation (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002), 77.
♦ STRAIGHT AND NARROW OLD IBM TYPE: Charles Bennett, quoted by George Johnson in “Rolf Landauer, Pioneer in Computer Theory, Dies at 72,” The New York Times, 30 April 1999.
♦ “YOU MIGHT SAY THIS IS THE REVENGE”: Interview, Charles Bennett, 27 October 2009.
♦ BENNETT AND HIS RESEARCH ASSISTANT: J. A. Smolin, “The Early Days of Experimental Quantum Cryptography,” IBM Journal of Research and Development 48 (2004): 47–52.
♦ “WE SAY THINGS SUCH AS ‘ALICE SENDS BOB’ ”: Barbara M. Terhal, “Is Entanglement Monogamous?” IBM Journal of Research and Development 48, no. 1 (2004): 71–78.
♦ FOLLOWING AN INTRICATE AND COMPLEX PROTOCOL: A detailed explanation can be found in Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Codebreaking (London: Fourth Estate, 1999); it takes ten pages of exquisite prose, beginning at 339.
♦ “STAND BY: I’LL TELEPORT YOU SOME GOULASH”: IBM advertisement, Scientific American (February 1996), 0–1; Anthony H. G. Hey, ed., Feynman and Computation, xiii; Tom Siegfried, The Bit and the Pendulum, 13.
♦ “UNFORTUNATELY THE PREPOSTEROUS SPELLING QUBIT”: N. David Mermin, Quantum Computer Science: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4.
♦ “CAN QUANTUM-MECHANICAL DESCRIPTION OF PHYSICAL REALITY”: Physical Review 47 (1935): 777–80.
♦ “EINSTEIN HAS ONCE AGAIN EXPRESSED HIMSELF”: Wolfgang Pauli to Werner Heisenberg, 15 June 1935, quoted in Louisa Gilder, The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn (New York: Knopf, 2008), 162.
♦ “THAT WHICH REALLY EXISTS IN B”: Albert Einstein to Max Born, March 1948, in The Born-Einstein Letters, trans. Irene Born (New York: Walker, 1971), 164.
♦ IT TOOK MANY MORE YEARS BEFORE THE LATTER: Asher Peres, “Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen, and Shannon,” arXiv:quant-ph/0310010 v1, 2003.
♦ “TERMINOLOGY CAN SAY IT ALL”: Christopher A. Fuchs, “Quantum Mechanics as Quantum Information (and Only a Little More”: arXiv: quant-ph/1003.5209 v1, 26 March 2010: 3.
♦ BENNETT PUT ENTANGLEMENT TO WORK: Charles H. Bennett et al., “Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State Via Dual Classical and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Channels,” Physical Review Letters 70 (1993): 1895.
♦ “SECRET! SECRET! CLOSE THE DOORS”: Richard Feynman, “Simulating Physics with Computers,” in Anthony H. G. Hey, ed., Feynman and Computation, 136.
♦ “FEYNMAN’S INSIGHT”: Interview, Charles H. Bennett, 27 October 2009.
♦ “A PRETTY MISERABLE SPECIMEN”: N. David Mermin, Quantum Computer Science, 17.
♦ RSA ENCRYPTION: named after its inventors, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman.
♦ THEY ESTIMATED THAT THE COMPUTATION: T. Kleinjung, K. Aoki, J. Franke, et al., “Factorization of a 768-bit RSA modulus,” Eprint archive no. 2010/006, 2010.
♦ “QUANTUM COMPUTERS WERE BASICALLY A REVOLUTION”: Dorit Aharonov, panel discussion “Harnessing Quantum Physics,”18 October 2009, Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Ontario; and e-mail message 10 February 2010.
♦ “MANY PEOPLE CAN READ A BOOK”: Charles H. Bennett, “Publicity, Privacy, and Permanence of Information,” in Quantum Computing: Back Action, AIP Conference Proceeding 864 (2006), ed. Debabrata Goswami (Melville, N.Y.: American Institute of Physics), 175–79.
♦ “IF SHANNON WERE AROUND NOW”: Charles H. Bennett, interview, 27 October 2009.
♦ “TO WORK OUT ALL THE POSSIBLE MIRRORED ROOMS”: Shannon interview with Anthony Liversidge, Omni (August 1987), in Claude Elwood Shannon, Collected Papers, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), xxxii.
♦ A MODEST TO-DO LIST: John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1989), 368.
14. AFTER THE FLOOD
♦ “SUPPOSE WITHIN EVERY BOOK”: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 394.
♦ “THE UNIVERSE (WHICH OTHERS CALL THE LIBRARY)”: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1962), 54.
♦ “IT IS CONJECTURED THAT THIS BRAVE NEW WORLD”: Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Labyrinths, 8.
♦ “OUR HERESIARCH UNCLE”: William Gibson, “An Invitation,” introduction to Labyrinths, xii.
♦ “WHAT A STRANGE CHAOS”: Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1838), 111.
♦ “NO THOUGHT CAN PERISH”: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Power of Words” (1845), in Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 823–24.
♦ “IT WOULD EMBRACE IN THE SAME FORMULA”: Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, trans. Frederick Wilson Truscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory (New York: Dover, 1951).
♦ “IN TURNING OUR VIEWS”: Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 44.
♦ “THE ART OF PHOTOGENIC DRAWING”: Nathaniel Parker Willis, “The Pencil of Nature: A New Discovery,” The Corsair 1, no. 5 (April 1839): 72.
♦ “IN FACT, THERE IS A GREAT ALBUM OF BABEL”: Ibid., 71.
♦ “THE SYSTEM OF THE ‘UNIVERSE AS A WHOLE’ ”: Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Minds and Machines 59, no. 236 (1950): 440.
♦ “SUCH A BLAZE OF KNOWLEDGE AND DISCOVERY”: H. G. Wells, A Short History of the World (San Diego: Book Tree, 2000), 97.
♦ “THE ROMANS BURNT THE BOOKS OF THE JEWS”: Isaac Disraeli, Curiosities of Literature (London: Routledge & Sons, 1893), 17.
♦ “ALL THE LOST PLAYS OF THE ATHENIANS!”: Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (London: Samuel French, 1993), 38.
♦ “IF YOU WANT TO WRITE ABOUT FOLKLORE”: “Wikipedia: Requested Articles,” http://web.archive.org/web/20010406104800/www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Requested_articles (accessed 4 April 2001).
♦ “AGING IS WHAT YOU GET”: Quoted by Nicholson Baker in “The Charms of Wikipedia,” New York Review of Books 55, no. 4 (20 March 2008). The same anonymous user later struck again, vandalizing the entries on angioplasty and Sigmund Freud.
♦ “IT HAS NEVER BEEN SPREAD OUT, YET”: Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (London: Macmillan, 1893), 169.
♦ “THIS IS AN OBJECT IN SPACE, AND I’VE SEEN IT”: Interview, Jimmy Wales, 24 July 2008.
♦ “DIE SCHRAUBE AN DER HINTEREN LINKEN BREMSBACKE”: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Die_Schraube_an_der_hinteren_linken_Bremsbacke_am_Fahrrad_von_Ulrich_Fuchs (accessed 25 July 2008).
♦ “A PLAN ENTIRELY NEW”: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3rd edition, title page; cf. Richard Yeo, Encyclopædic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 181.
♦ “MANY TOPICS ARE BASED ON THE RELATIONSHIP”: “Wikipedia: What Wikipedia Is Not,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not (accessed 3 August 2008).
♦ “HE READ FOR METAPHYSICS”: Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, chapter 51.
♦ “I BEGAN STANDING WITH MY COMPUTER OPEN”: Nicholson Baker, “The Charms of Wikipedia.”
♦ “A HAMADRYAD IS A WOOD-NYMPH”: John Banville, The Infinities (London: Picador, 2009), 178.
♦ “MADE UP OF SYLLABLES THAT APPEAR”: Deming Seymour, “A New Yorker at Large,” Sarasota Herald, 25 August 1929.
♦ BY 1934 THE BUREAU WAS MANAGING A LIST: “Regbureau,” The New Yorker (26 May 1934), 16.
♦ AS THE HISTORIAN BRIAN OGILVIE HAS SHOWN: Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
♦ SCANDIX, PECTEN VENERIS, HERBA SCANARIA: Ibid., 173.
♦ CATALOGUE OF 6,000 PLANTS: Caspar Bauhin; Ibid., 208.
♦ “THE NAME OF A MAN IS LIKE HIS SHADOW”: Ernst Pulgram, Theory of Names (Berkeley, Calif.: American Name Society, 1954), 3.
♦ “A SCIENTIST’S IDEA OF A SHORT WAY”: Michael Amrine, “ ‘Megabucks’ for What’s ‘Hot,’ ” The New York Times Magazine, 22 April 1951.
♦ “IT’S AS IF YOU KNEEL TO PLANT THE SEED”: Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (New York: Knopf, 2010), 8.
♦ SERVER FARMS PROLIFERATE: Cf. Tom Vanderbilt, “Data Center Overload,” The New York Times Magazine, 14 June 2009.
♦ LLOYD CALCULATES: Seth Lloyd, “Computational Capacity of the Universe,” Physical Review Letters 88, no. 23 (2002).
15. NEW NEWS EVERY DAY
♦ “SORRY FOR ALL THE UPS AND DOWNS”: http://www.andrewtobias.com/bkoldcolumns/070118.html (accessed 18 January 2007).
♦ “GREAT MUTATION”: Carl Bridenbaugh, “The Great Mutation,” American Historical Review 68, no. 2 (1963): 315–31.
♦ “NOTWITHSTANDING THE INCESSANT CHATTER”: Ibid., 322.
♦ A THOUSAND PEOPLE IN THE BALLROOM: “Historical News,” American Historical Review 63, no. 3 (April 1963): 880.
♦ TENDED TO SLOT THE PRINTING PRESS: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 25.
♦ “DATA COLLECTION, STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS”: Ibid., xvi.
♦ “A DECISIVE POINT OF NO RETURN”: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, “Clio and Chronos: An Essay on the Making and Breaking of History-Book Time,” History and Theory 6, suppl. 6: History and the Concept of Time (1966), 64.
♦ “ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORICAL CHANGE”: Ibid., 42.
♦ “SCRIBAL CULTURE”: Ibid., 61.
♦ PRINT WAS TRUSTWORTHY, RELIABLE, AND PERMANENT: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 624 ff.
♦ “AS I SEE IT … MANKIND IS FACED WITH NOTHING SHORT OF”: Carl Bridenbaugh, “The Great Mutation,” 326.
♦ “THIS IS A MISREADING OF THE PREDICAMENT”: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, “Clio and Chronos,” 39.
♦ “I HEAR NEW NEWS EVERY DAY”: Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor, 1927), 14.
♦ “TO WHICH RESULT THAT HORRIBLE MASS OF BOOKS”: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Leibniz Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 29; cf. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 254.
♦ “THOSE DAYS, WHEN (AFTER PROVIDENCE”: Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (1729) (London: Methuen, 1943), 41.
♦ “KNOWLEDGE OF SPEECH, BUT NOT OF SILENCE”: T. S. Eliot, “The Rock,” in Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 147.
♦ “THE TSUNAMI OF AVAILABLE FACT”: David Foster Wallace, Introduction to The Best American Essays 2007 (New York: Mariner, 2007).
♦ “UNFORTUNATELY, ‘INFORMATION RETRIEVING,’ HOWEVER SWIFT”: Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 2, The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970), 182.
♦ “ELECTRONIC MAIL SYSTEM”: Jacob Palme, “You Have 134 Unread Mail! Do You Want to Read Them Now?” in Computer-Based Message Services, ed. Hugh T. Smith (North Holland: Elsevier, 1984), 175–76.
♦ A PAIR OF PSYCHOLOGISTS: C. J. Bartlett and Calvin G. Green, “Clinical Prediction: Does One Sometimes Know Too Much,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 13, no. 3 (1966): 267–70.
♦ “THE INFORMATION YOU ARE RECEIVING IS PREPARED FOR YOU”: Siegfried Streufert et al., “Conceptual Structure, Information Search, and Information Utilization,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2, no. 5 (1965): 736–40.
♦ “INFORMATION-LOAD PARADIGM”: For example, Naresh K. Malhotra, “Information Load and Consumer Decision Making,” Journal of Consumer Research 8 (March 1982): 419.
♦ “E-MAIL, MEETINGS, LISTSERVS, AND IN-BASKET PAPER PILES”: Tonyia J. Tidline, “The Mythology of Information Overload,” Library Trends 47, no. 3 (Winter 1999): 502.
♦ “WE PAY TO HAVE NEWSPAPERS DELIVERED”: Charles H. Bennett, “Demons, Engines, and the Second Law,” Scientific American 257, no. 5 (1987): 116.
♦ “AS THE DESIRED INFORMATION”: G. Bernard Shaw to the Editor, Whitaker’s Almanack, 31 May 1943.
♦ “DON’T ASK BY TELEPHONE FOR WORLD’S SERIES SCORES”: The New York Times, 8 October 1929, 1.
♦ “YOU HUNCH LIKE A PIANIST”: Anthony Lane, “Byte Verse,” The New Yorker, 20 February 1995, 108.
♦ “THE OBVIOUS COUNTERHYPOTHESIS ARISES”: Daniel C. Dennett, “Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (1990): 132.
♦ “TAKE THE LIBRARY OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM”: Augustus De Morgan, Arithmetical Books: From the Invention of Printing to the Present Time (London: Taylor & Walton, 1847), ix.
♦ “THE MULTITUDE OF BOOKS, THE SHORTNESS OF TIME”: Vincent of Beauvais, Prologue, Speculum Maius, quoted in Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 12.
♦ “THE PERCEPTION OF AN OVERABUNDANCE”: Ibid.
♦ “DRIVEN BY THE NEED TO MASTER THE INFORMATION OVERLOAD”: Brian W. Ogilvie, “The Many Books of Nature: Renaissance Naturalists and Information Overload,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 40.
♦ “A MAN WHO HAS SOMETHING TO SAY”: Bertolt Brecht, Radio Theory (1927), quoted in Kathleen Woodward, The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture (Madison, Wisc.: Coda Press, 1980).
EPILOGUE
♦ “IT WAS INEVITABLE THAT MEANING”: Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 119.
♦ “WE ARE TODAY AS FAR INTO THE ELECTRIC AGE”: Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 1.
♦ “TODAY … WE HAVE EXTENDED OUR CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEMS”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 3.
♦ “WHAT WHISPERS ARE THESE”: Walt Whitman, “Years of the Modern,” Leaves of Grass (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1919), 272.
♦ THEOLOGIANS BEGAN SPEAKING OF A SHARED MIND: For example, “Two beings, or two millions—any number thus placed ‘in communication’—all possess one mind.” Parley Parker Pratt, Key to the Science of Theology (1855), quoted in John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 275.
♦ “IT BECOMES ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY”: “… this amounts to imagining, above the animal biosphere and continuing it, a human sphere, the sphere of reflection, of conscious and free invention, of thought strictly speaking, in short, the sphere of mind or noosphere.” Édouard Le Roy, Les Origines humaines et l’évolution de l’intelligence (Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1928), quoted and translated by M. J. Aronson, Journal of Philosophy 27, no. 18 (28 August 1930): 499.
♦ “DOES IT NOT SEEM AS THOUGH A GREAT BODY”: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, trans. Sarah Appleton-Weber (Brighton, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 1999), 174.
♦ “NONSENSE, TRICKED OUT”: Mind 70, no. 277 (1961): 99. Medawar did not much like Teilhard’s prose, either: “that tipsy, euphoric prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.”
♦ WRITERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: Perhaps first and most notably Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (London: Methuen, 1930).
♦ “OUR MULTITUDE OF UNCO-ORDINATED GANGLIA”: H. G. Wells, World Brain (London: Methuen, 1938), xiv.
♦ “IN A FEW SCORE YEARS”: Ibid., 56.
♦ “SORT OF CEREBRUM FOR HUMANITY”: Ibid., 63.
♦ “A NETWORK OF MARVELLOUSLY GNARLED AND TWISTED STEMS”: H. G. Wells, The Passionate Friends (London: Harper, 1913), 332; H. G. Wells, The War in the Air (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 14.
♦ “IT’S NOT IN THE BEEPS”: Quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 189.
♦ “I KNOW AN UNCOUTH REGION”: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1962), 54.
♦ “BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER”: Fred I. Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), vii.
♦ “I TAKE ‘HELL’ IN ITS THEOLOGICAL SENSE”: Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “Myths of the Informational Society,” in Kathleen Woodward, The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture (Madison, Wisc.: Coda Press, 1980), 3.
♦ “I IMAGINE … THAT THE ENTRIES OF THE DICTIONARY”: Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 220.
♦ “ALL HUMAN THOUGHTS MIGHT BE ENTIRELY RESOLVABLE”: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, De scientia universali seu calculo philosophico, 1875; cf. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 281.
♦ “IS IT SIGNALING, LIKE TELEGRAPHS?”: Margaret Atwood, “Atwood in the Twittersphere,” The New York Review of Books blog, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/mar/29/atwood-in-the-twittersphere/, 29 March 2010.
♦ “GO MAD IN HERDS”: Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1850), 14.
♦ BROWSE SU[BJECT] CENSORSHIP: Nicholson Baker, “Discards” (1994), in The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (New York: Random House, 1996), 168.
♦ “WE HAVE A LEXICON OF THE CURRENT LANGUAGE”: Interview, Allan Jennings, February 1996; James Gleick, “Here Comes the Spider,” in What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 128–32.
♦ “I READ SOMEWHERE THAT EVERYBODY ON THIS PLANET”: John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1990), 45.
♦ THE IDEA CAN BE TRACED BACK: Albert-László Barabási, Linked (New York: Plume, 2003), 26 ff.
♦ WHAT WATTS AND STROGATZ DISCOVERED: Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks,” Nature 393 (1998): 440–42; also Duncan J. Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (New York: Norton, 2003); Albert-László Barabási, Linked.
♦ “INFECTIOUS DISEASES ARE PREDICTED”: Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks,” 442.
♦ “WE WANT THE DEMON, YOU SEE”: Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad, trans. Michael Kandel (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975), 155.
♦ “WHEN IT WAS PROCLAIMED”: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” Labyrinths, 54.
♦ “HE THAT DESIRES TO PRINT A BOOK”: John Donne, “From a Sermon Preached before King Charles I” (April 1627).
