What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier

by James Gleick

  And, “From the wheels-upon-wheels-upon-wheels evolution of computer programming dig out, systematize and display every feature that illuminates the level-upon-level-upon-level structure of physics.”

  And, “Finally. Deplore? No, celebrate the absence of a clean clear definition of the term ‘bit’ as elementary unit in the establishment of meaning.… If and when we learn how to combine bits in fantastically large numbers to obtain what we call existence, we will know better what we mean both by bit and by existence.”

  This is the challenge that remains, and not just for scientists: the establishment of meaning.

  * * *

  ♦ “It was either R4 or a black hole. But the Feynman sum over histories allows it to be both at once.”

  ♦ Von Neumann’s formula for the theoretical energy cost of every logical operation was kT ln 2 joules per bit, where T is the computer’s operating temperature and k is the Boltzman constant. Szilárd had proved that the demon in his engine can get kT ln 2 of work out of every molecule it selects, so that energy cost must be paid somewhere in the cycle.

  ♦ This word is not universally accepted, though the OED recognized it as of December 2007. David Mermin wrote that same year: “Unfortunately the preposterous spelling qubit currently holds sway.… Although “qubit” honors the English (German, Italian,…) rule that q should be followed by u, it ignores the equally powerful requirement that qu should be followed by a vowel. My guess is that “qubit” has gained acceptance because it visually resembles an obsolete English unit of distance, the homonymic cubit. To see its ungainliness with fresh eyes, it suffices to imagine … that one erased transparencies and cleaned ones ears with Qutips.”

  14 | AFTER THE FLOOD

  (A Great Album of Babel)

  Suppose within every book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place.

  —Hilary Mantel (2009)♦

  “THE UNIVERSE (which others call the Library)…”♦

  Thus Jorge Luis Borges began his 1941 story “The Library of Babel,” about the mythical library that contains all books, in all languages, books of apology and prophecy, the gospel and the commentary upon that gospel and the commentary upon the commentary upon the gospel, the minutely detailed history of the future, the interpolations of all books in all other books, the faithful catalogue of the library and the innumerable false catalogues. This library (which others call the universe) enshrines all the information. Yet no knowledge can be discovered there, precisely because all knowledge is there, shelved side by side with all falsehood. In the mirrored galleries, on the countless shelves, can be found everything and nothing. There can be no more perfect case of information glut.

  We make our own storehouses. The persistence of information, the difficulty of forgetting, so characteristic of our time, accretes confusion. As the free, amateur, collaborative online encyclopedia called Wikipedia began to overtake all the world’s printed encyclopedias in volume and comprehensiveness, the editors realized that too many names had multiple identities. They worked out a disambiguation policy, which led to the creation of disambiguation pages—a hundred thousand and more. For example, a user foraging in Wikipedia’s labyrinthine galleries for “Babel” finds “Babel (disambiguation),” which leads in turn to the Hebrew name for ancient Babylon, to the Tower of Babel, to an Iraqi newspaper, a book by Patti Smith, a Soviet journalist, an Australian language teachers’ journal, a film, a record label, an island in Australia, two different mountains in Canada, and “a neutrally aligned planet in the fictional Star Trek universe.” And more. The paths of disambiguation fork again and again. For example, “Tower of Babel (disambiguation)” lists, besides the story in the Old Testament, songs, games, books, a Brueghel painting, an Escher woodcut, and “the tarot card.” We have made many towers of Babel.

  Long before Wikipedia, Borges also wrote about the encyclopedia “fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopedia (New York, 1917),” a warren of fiction mingling with fact, another hall of mirrors and misprints, a compendium of pure and impure information that projects its own world. That world is called Tlön. “It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers.…”♦ writes Borges. “This plan is so vast that each writer’s contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos.” With good reason, the Argentine master has been taken up as a prophet (“our heresiarch uncle,”♦ William Gibson says) by another generation of writers in the age of information.

  Long before Borges, the imagination of Charles Babbage had conjured another library of Babel. He found it in the very air: a record, scrambled yet permanent, of every human utterance.

  What a strange chaos is this wide atmosphere we breathe!… The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man’s changeful will.♦

  Edgar Allan Poe, following Babbage’s work eagerly, saw the point. “No thought can perish,”♦ he wrote in 1845, in a dialogue between two angels. “Did there not cross your mind some thought of the physical power of words? Is not every word an impulse on the air?” Further, every impulse vibrates outward indefinitely, “upward and onward in their influences upon all particles of all matter,” until it must, “in the end, impress every individual thing that exists within the universe.” Poe was also reading Newton’s champion Pierre-Simon Laplace. “A being of infinite understanding,” wrote Poe, “—one to whom the perfection of the algebraic analysis lay unfolded” could trace the undulations backward to their source.

  Babbage and Poe took an information-theoretic view of the new physics. Laplace had expounded a perfect Newtonian mechanical determinism; he went further than Newton himself, arguing for a clockwork universe in which nothing is left to chance. Since the laws of physics apply equally to the heavenly bodies and the tiniest particles, and since they operate with perfect reliability, then surely (said Laplace) the state of the universe at every instant follows inexorably from the past and must lead just as relentlessly to the future. It was too soon to conceive of quantum uncertainty, chaos theory, or the limits of computability. To dramatize his perfect determinism, Laplace asked us to imagine a being—an “intelligence”—capable of perfect knowledge:

  It would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.♦

  Nothing else Laplace wrote ever became as famous as this thought experiment. It rendered useless not only God’s will but Man’s. To scientists this extreme Newtonianism seemed cause for optimism. To Babbage, all nature suddenly resembled a vast calculating engine, a grand version of his own deterministic machine: “In turning our views from these simple consequences of the juxtaposition of a few wheels, it is impossible not to perceive the parallel reasoning, as applied to the mighty and far more complex phenomena of nature.”♦ Each atom, once disturbed, must communicate its motion to others, and they in turn influence waves of air, and no impulse is ever entirely lost. The track of every canoe remains somewhere in the oceans. Babbage, whose railroad pen recorder traced on a roll of paper the history of a journey, saw information, formerly evanescent, as a series of physical impressions that were, or could be preserved. The phonograph, impressing sound into foil or wax, had yet to be invented, but Babbage could view the atmosphere as an engi
ne of motion with meaning: “every atom impressed with good and with ill … which philosophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base.” Every word ever said, whether heard by a hundred listeners or none, far from having vanished into the air, leaves its indelible mark, the complete record of human utterance being encrypted by the laws of motion and capable, in theory, of being recovered—given enough computing power.

  This was overoptimistic. Still, the same year Babbage published his essay, the artist and chemist Louis Daguerre in Paris perfected his means of capturing visual images on silver-coated plates. His English competitor, William Fox Talbot, called this “the art of photogenic drawing, or of forming pictures and images of natural objects by means of solar light.”♦ Talbot saw something meme-like. “By means of this contrivance,” he wrote, “it is not the artist who makes the picture, but the picture which makes itself.” Now the images that fly before our eyes could be frozen, impressed upon substance, made permanent.

  By painting or drawing, an artist—with skill, training, and long labor—reconstructs what the eye might see. By contrast, a daguerreotype is in some sense the thing itself—the information, stored, in an instant. It was unimaginable, but there it was. The possibilities made the mind reel. Once storage began, where would it stop? An American essayist immediately connected photography to Babbage’s atmospheric library of sounds: Babbage said that every word was registered somewhere in the air, so perhaps every image, too, left its permanent mark—somewhere.

  In fact, there is a great album of Babel. But what too, if the great business of the sun be to act registrar likewise, and to give out impressions of our looks, and pictures of our actions; and so … for all we know to the contrary, other worlds may be peopled and conducted with the images of persons and transactions thrown off from this and from each other; the whole universal nature being nothing more than phonetic and photogenic structures.♦

  The universe, which others called a library or an album, then came to resemble a computer. Alan Turing may have noticed this first: observing that the computer, like the universe, is best seen as a collection of states, and the state of the machine at any instant leads to the state at the next instant, and thus all the future of the machine should be predictable from its initial state and its input signals.

  The universe is computing its own destiny.

  Turing noticed that Laplace’s dream of perfection might be possible in a machine but not in the universe, because of a phenomenon which, a generation later, would be discovered by chaos theorists and named the butterfly effect. Turing described it this way in 1950:

  The system of the “universe as a whole” is such that quite small errors in initial conditions can have an overwhelming effect at a later time. The displacement of a single electron by a billionth of a centimetre at one moment might make the difference between a man being killed by an avalanche a year later, or escaping.♦

  If the universe is a computer, we may still struggle to access its memory. If it is a library, it is a library without shelves. When all the world’s sounds disperse through the atmosphere, no word is left attached to any particular bunch of atoms. The words are anywhere and everywhere. That was why Babbage called this information store a “chaos.” Once again he was ahead of his time.

  When the ancients listed the Seven Wonders of the World, they included the Lighthouse of Alexandria, a 400-foot stone tower built to aid sailors, but overlooked the library nearby. The library, amassing hundreds of thousands of papyrus rolls, maintained the greatest collection of knowledge on earth, then and for centuries to come. Beginning in the third century BCE, it served the Ptolemies’ ambition to buy, steal, or copy all the writings of the known world. The library enabled Alexandria to surpass Athens as an intellectual center. Its racks and cloisters held the dramas of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides; the mathematics of Euclid, Archimedes, and Eratosthenes; poetry, medical texts, star charts, mystic writings—“such a blaze of knowledge and discovery,” H. G. Wells declared, “as the world was not to see again until the sixteenth century.… It is the true beginning of Modern History.”♦ The lighthouse loomed large, but the library was the real wonder. And then it burned.

  Exactly when and how that happened, no one can ever know. Probably more than once. Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy’s souls reside there, too. “The Romans burnt the books of the Jews, of the Christians, and the philosophers,” Isaac D’Israeli noted in the nineteenth century; “the Jews burnt the books of the Christians and the Pagans; and the Christians burnt the books of the Pagans and the Jews.”♦ The Qin dynasty burned China’s books in order to erase previous history. The erasure was effective, the written word being fragile. What we have of Sophocles is not even a tenth of his plays. What we have of Aristotle is mostly second- or thirdhand. For historians peering into the past, the destruction of the Great Library is an event horizon, a boundary across which information does not pass. Not even a partial catalogue survived the flames.

  “All the lost plays of the Athenians!”♦ wails Thomasina (a young mathematician who resembles Ada Byron) to her tutor, Septimus, in Tom Stoppard’s drama Arcadia. “Thousands of poems—Aristotle’s own library … How can we sleep for grief?”

  “By counting our stock,” Septimus replies.

  You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language.

  Anyway, according to Borges, the missing plays can be found in the Library of Babel.

  In honor of the lost library, Wikipedia drew hundreds of its editors to Alexandria in the eighth summer of its existence—people called Shipmaster, Brassratgirl, Notafish, and Jimbo who ordinarily meet only online. More than 7 million such user names had been registered by then; the pilgrims came from forty-five countries, paying their own way, toting laptops, exchanging tradecraft, wearing their fervor on their T-shirts. By then, July 2008, Wikipedia comprised 2.5 million articles in English, more than all the world’s paper encyclopedias combined, and a total of 11 million in 264 languages, including Wolof, Twi, and Dutch Low Saxon, but not including Choctaw, closed by community vote after achieving only fifteen articles, or Klingon, found to be a “constructed,” if not precisely fictional, language. The Wikipedians consider themselves as the Great Library’s heirs, their mission the gathering of all recorded knowledge. They do not, however, collect and preserve existing texts. They attempt to summarize shared knowledge, apart from and outside of the individuals who might have thought it was theirs.

  Like the imaginary library of Borges, Wikipedia begins to appear boundless. Several dozen of the non-English Wikipedias have, each, one article on Pokémon, the trading-card game, manga series, and media franchise. The English Wikipedia began with one article and then a jungle grew. There is a page for “Pokémon (disambiguation),” needed, among other reasons, in case anyone is looking for the Zbtb7 oncogene, which was called Pokemon (for POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic factor), until Nintendo’s trademark lawyers threatened to sue. There are at least five major articles about the popular-culture Pokémons, and these spawn secondary and side articles, about the Pokémon regions, items, television episodes, game tactics, and all 493 creatures, heroes, protagonists, rivals, companions, and clones, from Bulbasaur to Arceus. All are carefully researched and edited for accuracy, to ensure that they are reliable and true to the Pokémon universe, which does not actually, in some senses of the word, exist. Back in the real world, Wikipedia has, or aspires to have, detailed entries describing the routes, intersections, and histories of every numbered highway and road in the Un
ited States. (“Route 273 [New York State, decommissioned in 1980] began at an intersection with U.S. Route 4 in Whitehall. After the intersection, the route passed the Our Lady of Angels Cemetery, where it turned to the southeast. Route 273 ran along the base of Ore Red Hill, outside of Whitehall. Near Ore Red Hill, the highway intersected with a local road, which connected to US 4.”) There are pages for every known enzyme and human gene. The Encyclopaedia Britannica never aspired to such breadth. How could it, being made of paper?

  Alone among the great enterprises of the early Internet, Wikipedia was not a business; made no money, only lost money. It was supported by a nonprofit charity established for the purpose. By the time the encyclopedia had 50 million users daily, the foundation had a payroll of eighteen people, including one in Germany, one in the Netherlands, one in Australia, and one lawyer, and everyone else was a volunteer: the millions of contributors, the thousand or more designated “administrators,” and, always a looming presence, the founder and self-described “spiritual leader,” Jimmy Wales. Wales did not plan initially the scrappy, chaotic, dilettantish, amateurish, upstart free-for-all that Wikipedia quickly became. The would-be encyclopedia began with a roster of experts, academic credentials, verification, and peer review. But the wiki idea took over, willy-nilly. A “wiki,” from a Hawaiian word for “quick,” was a web site that could be not just viewed but edited, by anyone. A wiki was therefore self-created, or at least self-sustaining.

  Wikipedia first appeared to Internet users with a simple self-description:

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