The Information by James Gleick
♦ “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,?
♦ 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 C
♦ “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.