Sublime

In his novel The Double, José Saramago includes an epigraph: “Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.”

“A Mathematical Theory of Communication”—“the magna carta of the information age,” as Scientific American later called it—wasn’t about one particular thing, but rather about general rules and unifying ideas. “He was always searching for deep and fundamental relations,” Shannon’s colleague Brock McMillan explains. And here he had found them. One of

The irreversibility of time is the mechanism that brings order out of chaos. —ILYA PRIGOGINE

Morse had a great insight from which all the rest flowed. Knowing nothing about pith balls, bubbles, or litmus paper, he saw that a sign could be made from something simpler, more fundamental, and less tangible—the most minimal event, the closing and opening of a circuit. Never mind needles. The electric current flowed and was interrupted, and the

She devised a process, a set of rules, a sequence of operations. In another century this would be called an algorithm, later a computer program, but for now the concept demanded painstaking explanation. The trickiest point was that her algorithm was recursive. It ran in a loop. The result of one iteration became food for the next. Babbage had allud

For McLuhan this was prerequisite to the creation of global consciousness—global knowing. “Today,” he wrote, “we have extended our central nervous systems in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness,

Prigogine realized that although Boltzmann’s theory was correct, it did not apply to what we observe on Earth because our planet is an out-of-equilibrium pocket inside a larger system—the universe—that is moving toward equilibrium.

Within a few years, James Clerk Maxwell transforms Faraday’s visionary insight into a system of equations describing the fields. He grasps that light is nothing but a swift ripple upon these webs, and that these ripples, at greater wavelengths, can bear signals. Hertz reproduces them in the laboratory,