The Information

♦ “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/100
3.5209 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.