The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

The common element was randomness, Chaitin suddenly thought. Shannon linked randomness, perversely, to information. Physicists had found randomness inside the atom—the kind of randomness that Einstein deplored by complaining about God and dice. All these heroes of science were talking about or around randomness.

First law: The energy of the universe is constant. Second law: The entropy of the universe always increases.

“Information can be considered as order wrenched from disorder.”

We can see now that information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle. It pervades the sciences from top to bottom, transforming every branch of knowledge. Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing. What English speakers call “computer science” Europe

Language did not function as a storehouse of words, from which users could summon the correct items, preformed. On the contrary, words were fugitive, on the fly, expected to vanish again thereafter. When spoken, they were not available to be compared with, or measured against, other instantiations of themselves.

One reason for these misguesses was just the usual failure of imagination in the face of a radically new technology. The telegraph lay in plain view, but its lessons did not extrapolate well to this new device. The telegraph demanded literacy; the telephone embraced orality. A message sent by telegraph had first to be written, encoded, and tapped o

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Writing in and of itself had to reshape human consciousness. Among the many abilities gained by the written culture, not the least was the power of looking inward upon itself.

The alphabet spread by contagion. The new technology was both the virus and the vector of transmission. It could not be monopolized, and it could not be suppressed.