NewsBreakingOnline

Acclaimed science writer James Gleick talks about data, meaning and knowledge – and his new book, The Information Here’s a paradox: we live in an “information age” and yet information is a maddeningly elusive concept. We habitually confuse it with data, on the one hand, and with knowledge on the other. And yet it’s neither. There’s an arcane mathematical discipline called “information theory” that underpins all digital communications nowadays and yet resolutely disdains to make any connection between information and meaning. It would take a brave author to pursue such an elusive quarry. Or a foolhardy one. James Gleick is an accomplished stalker of mysterious ideas. His first book, Chaos (1987), provided a compelling introduction to a new science of disorder, unpredictability and complex systems. His new book, The Information , is in the same tradition. It’s a learned, discursive, sometimes wayward exploration of a very complicated subject. The subtitle, A History, A Theory, A Flood , gives the game away. This is really three books: one is about the history of information from earliest times to the present day. It opens with a memorable, beautifully written chapter about the “talking drums” of the Congo and explains how a drum with just two tones was used to communicate complex information quickly over large distances. After that we embark on a journey through the history of writing, the rise of the dictionary, the growth of English, the origins of programming and the arrival of Samuel Morse and his amazing electric telegraph. The second part centres on the work of Claude Shannon, the American mathematical genius who in 1948 proposed a general theory of information. Shannon was the guy who coined the term “bit” for the primary unit of information, and provided a secure theoretical underpinning for electronic communications (so in a way he’s the godfather of the modern world). The trouble was that Shannon’s conceptual clarity depended on divorcing information from meaning, a proposition that to this day baffles everyone who is not an engineer. But the most startling insights in the book come when Gleick moves to explore the role of information in biology and particle physics. From the moment when James Watson and Francis Crick cracked the structure of DNA, molecular biology effectively became a branch of computer science. For the replication of DNA is the copying of information and the manufacture of proteins is a transfer of information – the sending of a message. And then there’s quantum mechanics, the most incomprehensible part of physics, some of whose most eminent practitioners – such as the late John Archibald Wheeler – have begun to wonder if their field might not be, after all, just about information. “It from bit” was Wheeler’s way of putting it. “Every it – every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself – derives its function, its meaning, its very existence… from bits.” Finally, Gleick surveys the “flood” – the torrent of data and information that now engulfs us. In this section Gleick switches from history to speculation, which means that he is now in the same boat as the rest of us. This writer welcomes him aboard. John Naughton: The book has an astonishing range and I’ve learned a lot from it. It takes one into dozens of specialised fields – some of which (like quantum mechanics) are very arcane. How did you manage to do it? How many years did it take? And did you realise what you were taking on? James Gleick: I knew it was going to be a sprawling, amorphous project; I knew it would send shoots and tendrils every which way, and I didn’t know exactly how I was going to find a shape. In the end it took seven years, but I’d been thinking about it one way or another for a long time. I first heard about this baffling thing, “information theory”, from chaos scientists. In the 1990s I spent some time gathering material for a projected cultural history of the telephone – in other words, looking at the subject the wrong way round. And then, when I was immersed in my last book, about Isaac Newton, I started to feel that I was already writing about information more than, say, physics. JN: I found your account of the life and achievements of Ada Lovelace very moving. She has a pretty good claim to be recognised as the first computer programmer, and yet her story is a classic case-study in how brilliant women can be airbrushed from history, much as Rosalind Franklin was in the double helix story. It was good to see her being given her due. JG: I think of all the people who come and go in my book, she is my favourite. Worse than being airbrushed from history, she was never written in. She had a brief flash of celebrity as Byron’s daughter, but no one, with the lone exception of Charles Babbage, had a chance to glimpse her formidable mathematical powers. We can see it now in retrospect. She could never publish under her name; never belong to a professional society; never even attend university. Yet, working with Babbage as an anonymous younger sidekick, she surpassed his vision of what his proposed computing machines could do and could be. “First programmer” is apt. She was a genius. JN: The chapters I found hardest-going were the ones on randomness and particle physics – though I was much cheered up to discover that the great Richard Feynman said that nobody understands quantum mechanics. Were these the chapters that were the most difficult to write? JG: They were the most fun to write. Finally I had reached the scientific frontier; the point where the people of interest are alive and working and available for conversation. I spent time with Gregory Chaitin [an Argentine-American prodigy in both mathematics and computer science], who has a new idea every hour, and Charles Bennett [an IBM researcher famous for applying quantum physics to the process of information exchange], who showed me “Aunt Martha’s coffin” – his quantum teleportation device – buried under a pile of books and papers in a corner of his office. Hard going is OK. I take the view that we all have permission to be a little baffled by quantum information science and algorithmic information theory. JN: Claude Shannon plays a central role in the book and your portrayal of him is very vivid. One thing I hadn’t known was that Shannon’s PhD was on genetics viewed in terms of symbolic logic. Was that a surprise to you? JG: A complete surprise. I knew he had written an astounding master’s thesis applying Boolean logic to electrical circuits, but I had no idea about the genetics work. I was thrilled to learn about it, because I knew the connection between information and genetics was going to be a big topic for me. And then it turned out that Shannon’s work had not the slightest influence on modern genetics – he was in a world of his own, and the thesis vanished into academic oblivion. Yet it’s a kind of intellectual story I just love. On its idiosyncratic terms Shannon’s genetics work was apparently quite brilliant. This was long before anyone had any notion of DNA. “Genes” were as mysterious and hypothetical as atoms were to the ancient Greeks. Shannon said he would “speak as though the genes actually exist”, and invented a bunch of arbitrary symbols and proceeded to work out rules for recombination and cross-breeding that we can see, in hindsight, were right on the money. Yet he never published it. JN: There’s an interesting coincidence in the fact that the two defining breakthroughs in modern communications – the transistor and Shannon’s mathematical theory of information – should have emerged from the same lab at the same time. JG: I think you know I don’t consider that a coincidence. The place was right: the research laboratory run by the world’s great communications empire [Bell Labs, the formidable R&D arm of the AT&T telephone monopoly], where all sorts of oddballs were allowed to pursue loose ends with no obvious application to the bottom line. The time was right. The first lumbering computers were walking the earth, with their big hot vacuum tubes and their Boolean circuits. Shannon had a special genius – he was obsessed with just the right motley collection of ideas needed to spawn information theory – and the transistor guys were surely special in their own ways. But these inventions were due, and willy-nilly they arrived. JN: Although Shannon’s theory was a great breakthrough, his insistence on separating information from meaning must have alienated many people. Was a desire to bridge the two one of the reasons you embarked on the project? JG: Actually, that hadn’t occurred to me at first. My plan from the outset was to look at the origins and the influence of what we now call information theory, believing, as I do, that it underpins so much of our information hardware and our information networks and, yes, our information age. But as you note, information is not knowledge. We are more painfully aware of that now than ever. In explaining Shannon’s work I kept having to emphasise his point about the irrelevance of meaning; yet we know full well that meaning is what we really care about. This loomed larger and larger. There’s a hilarious moment in 1950 in a New York hotel meeting room when Shannon tries to explain “information” to anthropologists and psychologists such as Margaret Mead and Lawrence Frank, and they’re a little outraged. Where are the humans in this picture? Where are our brains? If it’s just wires and transistors, who cares? And surely this is precisely our problem, now that information is cheap and plentiful and ubiquitous. I was heartened when I came across a comment by philosopher and historian Jean-Pierre Dupuy: “It was inevitable that meaning would force its way back in.” I made that the epigraph for my final chapter. This is our challenge, surely. JN: Is it not the case that every shift in our communications environment has provoked “overload anxiety”? I can imagine folks in Venice in 1560 complaining about the torrent of print. Or is there something different about the present? JG: I think you’re unusually empathic to imagine ancient complaints about information overload, but of course you’re right. There was Leibniz bemoaning “that horrible mass of books – which keeps on growing…” When we complain that things have never been like this, it’s good to have some perspective. And yet, things have never been like this. Information has never been so cheap; our choices have never been so numerous; the cacophony has never been quite so grand. Everyone knows this, and everyone is right. It’s why we’re fascinated, if not obsessed, with Google and Twitter and all the rest of their oddly named species. We know that information poses as many challenges as opportunities. Computing Mathematics Physics John Naughton guardian.co.uk