What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier

by James Gleick

  9. ENTROPY AND ITS DEMONS

  ♦ “THOUGHT INTERFERES WITH THE PROBABILITY OF EVENTS”: David L. Watson, “Entropy and Organization,” Science 72 (1930): 222.

  ♦ THE RUMOR AT BELL LABS: Robert Price, “A Conversation with Claude Shannon: One Man’s Approach to Problem Solving,” IEEE Communications Magazine 22 (1984): 124.

  ♦ “THE THEORETICAL STUDY OF THE STEAM ENGINE”: For example, J. Johnstone, “Entropy and Evolution,” Philosophy 7 (July 1932): 287.

  ♦ MAXWELL TURNED ABOUT-FACE: James Clerk Maxwell, Theory of Heat, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1872), 186; 8th edition (London: Longmans, Green, 1891), 189 n.

  ♦ “YOU CAN’T WIN”: Peter Nicholls and David Langford, eds., The Science in Science Fiction (New York: Knopf, 1983), 86.

  ♦ “ALTHOUGH MECHANICAL ENERGY IS INDESTRUCTIBLE”: Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), “Physical Considerations Regarding the Possible Age of the Sun’s Heat,” lecture at the Meeting of the British Association at Manchester, September 1861, in Philosophical Magazine 152 (February 1862): 158.

  ♦ “IN CONSIDERING THE CONVERSION OF PSYCHICAL ENERGY”: Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” 1918b, 116, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1955).

  ♦ “CONFUSION, LIKE THE CORRELATIVE TERM ORDER”: James Clerk Maxwell, “Diffusion,” written for the ninth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, in The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. W. D. Niven, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890; repr. New York: Dover, 1965), 646.

  ♦ “TIME FLOWS ON, NEVER COMES BACK”: Léon Brillouin, “Life, Thermodynamics, and Cybernetics” (1949), in Harvey S. Leff and Andrew F. Rex, eds., Maxwell’s Demon 2: Entropy, Classical and Quantum Information, Computing (Bristol, U.K.: Institute of Physics, 2003), 77.

  ♦ “THE ACCIDENTS OF LIFE”: Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 106.

  ♦ “MORAL. THE 2ND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS”: James Clerk Maxwell to John William Strutt, 6 December 1870, in Elizabeth Garber, Stephen G. Brush, and C. W. F. Everitt, eds., Maxwell on Heat and Statistical Mechanics: On “Avoiding All Personal Enquiries” of Molecules (London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 205.

  ♦ “THE ODDS AGAINST A PIECE OF CHALK”: Quoted by Andrew Hodges, “What Did Alan Turing Mean by ‘Machine,’?” in Philip Husbands et al., The Mechanical Mind in History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 81.

  ♦ “AND YET NO WORK HAS BEEN DONE”: James Clerk Maxwell to Peter Guthrie Tait, 11 December 1867, in The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, ed. P. M. Harman, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 332.

  ♦ “HE DIFFERS FROM REAL LIVING ANIMALS”: Royal Institution Lecture, 28 February 1879, Proceedings of the Royal Institution 9 (1880): 113, in William Thomson, Mathematical and Physical Papers, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 21.

  ♦ “INFINITE SWARMS OF ABSURD LITTLE MICROSCOPIC IMPS”: “Editor’s Table,” Popular Science Monthly 15 (1879): 412.

  ♦ “CLERK MAXWELL’S DEMON”: Henry Adams to Brooks Adams, 2 May 1903, in Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of His Unpublished Letters, ed. Harold Cater (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 545.

  ♦ “INFINITELY SUBTILE SENSES”: Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science, trans. George Bruce Halsted (New York: Science Press, 1913), 152.

  ♦ “NOW WE MUST NOT INTRODUCE DEMONOLOGY”: James Johnstone, The Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 118.

  ♦ “IF WE VIEW THE EXPERIMENTING MAN”: Leó Szilárd, “On the Decrease of Entropy in a Thermodynamic System by the Intervention of Intelligent Beings,” trans. Anatol Rapoport and Mechthilde Knoller, from Leó Szilárd, “Über Die Entropieverminderung in Einem Thermodynamischen System Bei Eingriffen Intelligenter Wesen,” Zeitschrift für Physik 53 (1929): 840–56, in Harvey S. Leff and Andrew F. Rex, eds., Maxwell’s Demon 2, 111.

  ♦ “THINKING GENERATES ENTROPY”: Quoted in William Lanouette, Genius in the Shadows (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 64.

  ♦ “I THINK ACTUALLY SZILÁRD”: Shannon interview with Friedrich-Wilhelm Hagemeyer, 1977, quoted in Erico Mariu Guizzo, “The Essential Message: Claude Shannon and the Making of Information Theory” (Master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004).

  ♦ “I CONSIDER HOW MUCH INFORMATION IS PRODUCED”: Claude Shannon to Norbert Wiener, 13 October 1948, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Archives.

  ♦ “THAT SOME OF US SHOULD VENTURE TO EMBARK”: Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?, reprint ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1.

  ♦ “SCHRÖDINGER’S BOOK BECAME A KIND OF UNCLE TOM’S CABIN”: Gunther S. Stent, “That Was the Molecular Biology That Was,” Science 160, no. 3826 (1968): 392.

  ♦ “WHEN IS A PIECE OF MATTER SAID TO BE ALIVE?”: Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?, 69.

  ♦ “THE STABLE STATE OF AN ENZYME”: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961), 58.

  ♦ “TO PUT IT LESS PARADOXICALLY”: Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?, 71.

  ♦ “A COMPLETE (DOUBLE) COPY OF THE CODE-SCRIPT”: Ibid., 23.

  ♦ “IT SEEMS NEITHER ADEQUATE NOR POSSIBLE”: Ibid., 28.

  ♦ “WE BELIEVE A GENE—OR PERHAPS THE WHOLE CHROMOSOME FIBER”: Ibid., 61.

  ♦ “THE DIFFERENCE IN STRUCTURE”: Ibid., 5 (my emphasis).

  ♦ “THE LIVING ORGANISM HEALS ITS OWN WOUNDS”: Léon Brillouin, “Life, Thermodynamics, and Cybernetics,” 84.

  ♦ HE WROTE THIS IN 1950: Léon Brillouin, “Maxwell’s Demon Cannot Operate: Information and Entropy,” in Harvey S. Leff and Andrew F. Rex, eds., Maxwell’s Demon 2, 123.

  ♦ “MAXWELL’S DEMON DIED AT THE AGE OF 62”: Peter T. Landsberg, The Enigma of Time (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1982), 15.

  10. LIFE’S OWN CODE

  ♦ “WHAT LIES AT THE HEART OF EVERY LIVING THING”: Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1986), 112.

  ♦ “THE BIOLOGIST MUST BE ALLOWED”: W. D. Gunning, “Progression and Retrogression,” The Popular Science Monthly 8 (December 1875): 189, n1.

  ♦ “THE MOST NAÏVE AND OLDEST CONCEPTION”: Wilhelm Johannsen, “The Genotype Conception of Heredity,” American Naturalist 45, no. 531 (1911): 130.

  ♦ IT MUST BE QUANTIZED: “Discontinuity and constant differences between the ‘genes’ are the quotidian bread of Mendelism,” American Naturalist 45, no. 531 (1911): 147.

  ♦ “THE MINIATURE CODE SHOULD PRECISELY CORRESPOND”: Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?, reprint ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 62.

  ♦ SOME OF THE PHYSICISTS NOW TURNING TO BIOLOGY: Henry Quastler, ed., Essays on the Use of Information Theory in Biology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953).

  ♦ “A LINEAR CODED TAPE OF INFORMATION”: Sidney Dancoff to Henry Quastler, 31 July 1950, quoted in Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life: A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 119.

  ♦ NUMBER OF BITS REPRESENTED BY A SINGLE BACTERIUM: Henry Linschitz, “The Information Content of a Bacterial Cell,” in Henry Quastler, ed., Essays on the Use of Information Theory in Biology, 252.

  ♦ “HYPOTHETICAL INSTRUCTIONS TO BUILD AN ORGANISM”: Sidney Dancoff and Henry Quastler, “The Information Content and Error Rate of Living Things,” in Henry Quastler, ed., Essays on the Use of Information Theory in Biology, 264.

  ♦ “THE ESSENTIAL COMPLEXITY OF A SINGLE CELL”: Ibid., 270.

  ♦ AN ODD LITTLE LETTER: Boris Ephrussi, Urs Leopold, J. D. Watson, and J. J. Weigle, “Terminology in Bacterial Genetics,” Nature 171 (18 April 1953): 701.

  ♦ MEANT AS A JOKE: Cf. Sahotra Sarkar, Molecular Models of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005); Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?, 58; Harriett Ephrussi-Taylor to Joshua Lederberg, 3 Sep
tember 1953, and Lederberg annotation 30 April 2004, in Lederberg papers, http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/BB/A/J/R/R/ (accessed 22 January 2009); and James D. Watson, Genes, Girls, and Gamow: After the Double Helix (New York: Knopf, 2002), 12.

  ♦ GENES MIGHT LIE IN A DIFFERENT SUBSTANCE: In retrospect, everyone understood that this had been proven in 1944, by Oswald Avery at Rockefeller University. Not many researchers were convinced at the time, however.

  ♦ “ONE OF THE MOST COY STATEMENTS”: Gunther S. Stent, “DNA,” Daedalus 99 (1970): 924.

  ♦ “IT HAS NOT ESCAPED OUR NOTICE”: James D. Watson and Francis Crick, “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” Nature 171 (1953): 737.

  ♦ “IT FOLLOWS THAT IN A LONG MOLECULE”: James D. Watson and Francis Crick, “Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid,” Nature 171 (1953): 965.

  ♦ “DEAR DRS. WATSON & CRICK”: George Gamow to James D. Watson and Francis Crick, 8 July 1953, quoted in Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?, 131. Reprinted by permission of R. Igor Gamow.

  ♦ “AS IN THE BREAKING OF ENEMY MESSAGES”: George Gamow to E. Chargaff, 6 May 1954, Ibid., 141.

  ♦ “BY PRIVATE INTERNATIONAL BUSH TELEGRAPH”: Gunther S. Stent, “DNA,” 924.

  ♦ “PEOPLE DIDN’T NECESSARILY BELIEVE IN THE CODE”: Francis Crick, interview with Horace Freeland Judson, 20 November 1975, in Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 233.

  ♦ “A LONG NUMBER WRITTEN IN A FOUR-DIGITAL SYSTEM”: George Gamow, “Possible Relation Between Deoxyribonucleic Acid and Protein Structures,” Nature 173 (1954): 318.

  ♦ “BETWEEN THE COMPLEX MACHINERY IN A LIVING CELL”: Douglas R. Hofstadter, “The Genetic Code: Arbitrary?” (March 1982), in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 671.

  ♦ “THE NUCLEUS OF A LIVING CELL IS A STOREHOUSE OF INFORMATION”: George Gamow, “Information Transfer in the Living Cell,” Scientific American 193, no. 10 (October 1955): 70.

  ♦ UNNECESSARY IF SOME TRIPLETS MADE “SENSE”: Francis Crick, “General Nature of the Genetic Code for Proteins,” Nature 192 (30 December 1961): 1227.

  ♦ “THE SEQUENCE OF NUCLEOTIDES AS AN INFINITE MESSAGE”: Solomon W. Golomb, Basil Gordon, and Lloyd R. Welch, “Comma-Free Codes,” Canadian Journal of Mathematics 10 (1958): 202–209, quoted in Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?, 171.

  ♦ “ONCE ‘INFORMATION’ HAS PASSED INTO PROTEIN”: Francis Crick, “On Protein Synthesis,” Symposium of the Society for Experimental Biology 12 (1958): 152; Cf. Francis Crick, “Central Dogma of Molecular Biology,” Nature 227 (1970): 561–63; and Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 20–21.

  ♦ “THE COMPLETE DESCRIPTION OF THE ORGANISM”: Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation, 219–21.

  ♦ “IT IS IN THIS SENSE THAT ALL WORKING GENETICISTS”: Gunther S. Stent, “You Can Take the Ethics Out of Altruism But You Can’t Take the Altruism Out of Ethics,” Hastings Center Report 7, no. 6 (1977): 34; and Gunther S. Stent, “DNA,” 925.

  ♦ “IT DEPENDS UPON WHAT LEVEL”: Seymour Benzer, “The Elementary Units of Heredity,” in W. D. McElroy and B. Glass, eds., The Chemical Basis of Heredity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), 70.

  ♦ “THIS ATTITUDE IS AN ERROR OF GREAT PROFUNDITY”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 237.

  ♦ “WE ARE SURVIVAL MACHINES”: Ibid., xxi.

  ♦ “THEY ARE PAST MASTERS OF THE SURVIVAL ARTS”: Ibid., 19.

  ♦ “ENGLISH BIOLOGIST RICHARD DAWKINS HAS RECENTLY RAISED”: Stephen Jay Gould, “Caring Groups and Selfish Genes,” in The Panda’s Thumb (New York: Norton, 1980), 86.

  ♦ “A THIRTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD STUDENT OF ANIMAL BEHAVIOR”: Gunther S. Stent, “You Can Take the Ethics Out of Altruism But You Can’t Take the Altruism Out of Ethics,” 33.

  ♦ “EVERY CREATURE MUST BE ALLOWED TO ‘RUN’ ITS OWN DEVELOPMENT”: Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (London: Trübner & Co, 1878), 134.

  ♦ “A SCHOLAR … IS JUST A LIBRARY’S WAY”: Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 346.

  ♦ “ANTHROPOCENTRISM IS A DISABLING VICE OF THE INTELLECT”: Edward O. Wilson, “Biology and the Social Sciences,” Daedalus 106, no. 4 (Fall 1977), 131.

  ♦ “IT REQUIRES A DELIBERATE MENTAL EFFORT”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 265.

  ♦ “MIGHT ENSURE ITS SURVIVAL BY TENDING TO ENDOW”: Ibid., 36.

  ♦ “THEY DO NOT PLAN AHEAD”: Ibid., 25.

  ♦ “THERE IS A MOLECULAR ARCHEOLOGY IN THE MAKING”: Werner R. Loewenstein, The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication, and the Foundations of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93–94.

  ♦ “SELECTION FAVORS THOSE GENES WHICH SUCCEED”: Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 117.

  ♦ DAWKINS SUGGESTS THE CASE OF A GENE: Ibid., 196–97.

  ♦ THERE IS NO GENE FOR LONG LEGS: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 37.

  ♦ HABIT OF SAYING “A GENE FOR X”: Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, 21.

  ♦ “ALL WE WOULD NEED IN ORDER”: Ibid., 23.

  ♦ “ANY GENE THAT INFLUENCES THE DEVELOPMENT OF NERVOUS SYSTEMS”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 60.

  ♦ “IT IS NO MORE LIKELY TO DIE”: Ibid., 34.

  ♦ “TODAY THE TENDENCY IS TO SAY”: Max Delbrück, “A Physicist Looks At Biology,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 38 (1949): 194.

  11. INTO THE MEME POOL

  ♦ “WHEN I MUSE ABOUT MEMES”: Douglas R. Hofstadter, “On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures,” in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New York, Basic Books, 1985), 52.

  ♦ “NOW THROUGH THE VERY UNIVERSALITY OF ITS STRUCTURES”: Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Knopf, 1971), 145.

  ♦ “IDEAS HAVE RETAINED SOME OF THE PROPERTIES”: Ibid., 165.

  ♦ “IDEAS CAUSE IDEAS”: Roger Sperry, “Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values,” in New Views of the Nature of Man, ed. John R. Platt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 82.

  ♦ “I THINK THAT A NEW KIND”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 192.

  ♦ “THIS MAY NOT BE WHAT GEORGE WASHINGTON LOOKED LIKE THEN”: Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 347.

  ♦ “A WAGON WITH SPOKED WHEELS”: Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 204.

  ♦ “GENES CANNOT BE SELFISH”: Mary Midgley, “Gene-Juggling,” Philosophy 54 (October 1979).

  ♦ “A MEME … IS AN INFORMATION PACKET”: Daniel C. Dennett, “Memes: Myths, Misunderstandings, and Misgivings,” draft for Chapel Hill lecture, October 1998, http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/MEMEMYTH.FIN.htm (accessed 7 June 2010).

  ♦ “TO DIE FOR AN IDEA”: George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, “Clinical Notes,” American Mercury 3, no. 9 (September 1924), 55.

  ♦ I WAS PROMISED ON A TIME TO HAVE REASON FOR MY RHYME: Edmund Spenser, quoted by Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (London: 1662).

  ♦ “I BELIEVE THAT, GIVEN THE RIGHT CONDITIONS”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 322.

  ♦ “WHEN YOU PLANT A FERTILE MEME”: Quoted by Dawkins, Ibid., 192.

  ♦ “HARD AS THIS TERM MAY BE TO DELIMIT”: W. D. Hamilton, “The Play by Nature,” Science 196 (13 May 1977): 759.

  ♦ BIRDSONG CULTURE: Juan D. Delius, “Of Mind Memes and Brain Bugs, A Natural History of Culture,” in The Nature of Culture, ed. Walter A
. Koch (Bochum, Germany: Bochum, 1989), 40.

  ♦ “FROM LOOK TO LOOK”: James Thomson, “Autumn” (1730).

  ♦ “EVE, WHOSE EYE”: John Milton, Paradise Lost, IX:1036.

  ♦ WALTON PROPOSED SIMPLE SELF-REPLICATING SENTENCES: Douglas R. Hofstadter, “On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures,” 52.

  ♦ “I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU”: Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 346.

  ♦ “THE COMPUTERS IN WHICH MEMES LIVE”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 197.

  ♦ “IT WAS OBVIOUSLY PREDICTABLE”: Ibid., 329.

  ♦ “MAKE SEVEN COPIES OF IT EXACTLY AS IT IS WRITTEN”: Daniel W. VanArsdale, “Chain Letter Evolution,” http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/chain-letter/evolution.html (accessed 8 June 2010).

  ♦ “AN UNUSUAL CHAIN-LETTER REACHED QUINCY”: Harry Middleton Hyatt, Folk-Lore from Adams County, Illinois, 2nd and rev. ed. (Hannibal, Mo.: Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation, 1965), 581.

  ♦ “THESE LETTERS HAVE PASSED FROM HOST TO HOST”: Charles H. Bennett, Ming Li, and Bin Ma, “Chain Letters and Evolutionary Histories,” Scientific American 288, no. 6 (June 2003): 77.

  ♦ FOR DENNETT, THE FIRST FOUR NOTES: Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 344.

  ♦ “MEMES HAVE NOT YET FOUND”: Richard Dawkins, foreword to Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xii.

  ♦ “THE HUMAN WORLD IS MADE OF STORIES”: David Mitchell, Ghostwritten (New York: Random House, 1999), 378.

  ♦ “AS WITH ALL KNOWLEDGE, ONCE YOU KNEW IT”: Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 170.

  ♦ “A LIFE POURED INTO WORDS”: John Updike, “The Author Observes His Birthday, 2005,” Endpoint and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 2009), 8.

  ♦ “IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS INFORMATION”: Fred I. Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), xii.

  12. THE SENSE OF RANDOMNESS

  ♦ “I WONDER,” SHE SAID: Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005), 154.