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Book: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Quotes of Book: The Information: A History, a
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  1. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    1. You can't win; 2. You can't break even either." But this is the cosmic, fateful one. The universe is running down. It is a degenerative one-way street. The final state of maximum entropy is our destiny.
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  2. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    First law: The energy of the universe is constant. Second law: The entropy of the universe always increases.
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  3. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    A "file" was originally-in sixteenth-century England-a wire on which slips and bills and notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, and file cabinets; then the electronic namesakes of all these; and the inevitable irony. Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes.
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  4. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts. In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet {alfabet, alfabeto, }. The alphabet was invented only once.
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  5. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic.
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  6. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    One unlikely Luddite was also one of the first long-term beneficiaries. Plato {channeling the nonwriter Socrates} warned that this technology meant impoverishment: For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.
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  7. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience.
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  8. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    From this point of view, the laws of science represent data compression in action. A theoretical physicist acts like a very clever coding algorithm. "The laws of science that have been discovered can be viewed as summaries of large amounts of empirical data about the universe," wrote Solomonoff. "In the present context, each such law can be transformed into a method of compactly coding the empirical data that gave rise to that law." A good scientific theory is economical. This was yet another way of saying so.
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  9. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    The second law, then, is the tendency of the universe to flow from less likely {orderly} to more likely {disorderly} macrostates.
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  10. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    Even before the exact answer was reached, Crick crystallized its fundamental principles in a statement that he called {and is called to this day} the Central Dogma. It is a hypothesis about the direction of evolution and the origin of life; it is provable in terms of Shannon entropy in the possible chemical alphabets: Once "information" has passed into protein it cannot get out again. In more detail, the transfer of information from nucleic acid to nucleic acid, or from nucleic acid to protein may be possible, but transfer from protein to protein, or from protein to nucleic acid is impossible. Information means here the precise determination of sequence.
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  11. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    So the second law is merely probabilistic. Statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy."
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  12. James Gleick _ The Information: A History, a

    Turing exclaiming once, "No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mundane brain, something like the president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company.
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