James Gleick
James Gleick
James Gleickis an American author, historian of science, and sometime Internet pioneer whose work has chronicled the cultural impact of modern technology. Recognized for illuminating complex subjects through the techniques of narrative nonfiction, he has been called “one of the great science writers of all time.” Gleick's books include the international bestsellers Chaos: Making a New Science and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Three of them have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists; and The...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 August 1954
CountryUnited States of America
Scientifically, information is a choice - a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world - writing, painting, music, money.
You know, entropy is associated thermodynamically, in systems involving heat, with disorder. And in an analogous way, information is associated with disorder, which seems paradoxical. But when you think about it, a bit of information is a surprise. If you already knew what the message contained, there would be no new information in it.
The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level - an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.
A bit, the smallest unit of information, the fundamental particle of information theory, is a choice, yes or no, on or off. It's a choice that you can embody in electrical circuits, and it is thanks to that that we have all this ubiquitous computing.
Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.
We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.
Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Reading - even browsing - an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search. Patience is a virtue, gluttony a sin.
I take the view that we all have permission to be a little baffled by quantum information science and algorithmic information theory.
At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.
When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.
The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.
Information is crucial to our biological substance - our genetic code is information. But before 1950, it was not obvious that inheritance had anything to do with code. And it was only after the invention of the telegraph that we understood that our nerves carry messages, just like wires.
Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society.