What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier

by James Gleick

  ♦ FOUND A MAGICAL LITTLE BOOK: Interviews, Gregory J. Chaitin, 27 October 2007 and 14 September 2009; Gregory J. Chaitin, “The Limits of Reason,” Scientific American 294, no. 3 (March 2006): 74.

  ♦ “ASTOUNDING AND MELANCHOLY”: Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Gödel’s Proof (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 6.

  ♦ “IT WAS A VERY SERIOUS CONCEPTUAL CRISIS”: quoted in Gregory J. Chaitin, Information, Randomness & Incompleteness: Papers on Algorithmic Information Theory (Singapore: World Scientific, 1987), 61.

  ♦ HE WONDERED IF AT SOME LEVEL: “Algorithmic Information Theory,” in Gregory J. Chaitin, Conversations with a Mathematician (London: Springer, 2002), 80.

  ♦ “PROBABILITY, LIKE TIME”: John Archibald Wheeler, At Home in the Universe, Masters of Modern Physics, vol. 9 (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1994), 304.

  ♦ WHETHER THE POPULATION OF FRANCE: Cf. John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Probability (London: Macmillan, 1921), 291.

  ♦ HE CHOSE THREE: KNOWLEDGE, CAUSALITY, AND DESIGN: Ibid., 281.

  ♦ “CHANCE IS ONLY THE MEASURE”: Henri Poincaré, “Chance,” in Science and Method, trans. Francis Maitland (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003), 65.

  ♦ 1009732533765201358634673548: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955).

  ♦ AN ELECTRONIC ROULETTE WHEEL: Ibid., ix–x.

  ♦ “STATE OF SIN”: Von Neumann quoted in Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 703.

  ♦ “WHEN THE READING HEAD MOVES”: “A Universal Turing Machine with Two Internal States,” in Claude Elwood Shannon, Collected Papers, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), 733–41.

  ♦ “HE SUMMARIZES HIS OBSERVATIONS”: Gregory J. Chaitin, “On the Length of Programs for Computing Finite Binary Sequences,” Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 13 (1966): 567.

  ♦ “WE ARE TO ADMIT NO MORE CAUSES”: Isaac Newton, “Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy; Rule I,” Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

  ♦ IN THE WANING YEARS OF TSARIST RUSSIA: Obituary, Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society 22 (1990): 31; A. N. Shiryaev, “Kolmogorov: Life and Creative Activities,” Annals of Probability 17, no. 3 (1989): 867.

  ♦ UNLIKELY TO ATTRACT INTERPRETATION: David A. Mindell et al., “Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union,” in Science and Ideology: A Comparative History, ed. Mark Walker (London: Routledge, 2003), 66 and 81.

  ♦ HE SOON LEARNED TO HIS SORROW: Cf. “Amount of Information and Entropy for Continuous Distributions,” note 1, in Selected Works of A. N. Kolmogorov, vol. 3, Information Theory and the Theory of Algorithms, trans. A. B. Sossinksky (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), 33.

  ♦ “MORE TECHNOLOGY THAN MATHEMATICS”: A. N. Kolmogorov and A. N.Shiryaev, Kolmogorov in Perspective, trans. Harold H. McFaden, History of Mathematics vol. 20 (n.p.: American Mathematical Society, London Mathematical Society, 2000), 54.

  ♦ “WHEN I READ THE WORKS OF ACADEMICIAN KOLMOGOROV”: Quoted in Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 58.

  ♦ “CYBERNETICS IN WIENER’S UNDERSTANDING”: “Intervention at the Session,” in Selected Works of A. N. Kolmogorov, 31.

  ♦ “AT EACH GIVEN MOMENT”: Kolmogorov diary entry, 14 September 1943, in A. N. Kolmogorov and A. N. Shiryaev, Kolmogorov in Perspective, 50.

  ♦ “IS IT POSSIBLE TO INCLUDE THIS NOVEL”: “Three Approaches to the Definition of the Concept ‘Quantity of Information,’ ” in Selected Works of A. N. Kolmogorov, 188.

  ♦ “OUR DEFINITION OF THE QUANTITY”: A. N. Kolmogorov, “Combinatorial Foundations of Information Theory and the Calculus of Probabilities,” Russian Mathematical Surveys 38, no. 4 (1983): 29–43.

  ♦ “THE INTUITIVE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ‘SIMPLE’ AND ‘COMPLICATED’ ”: “Three Approaches to the Definition of the Concept ‘Quantity of Information,’ ” Selected Works of A. N. Kolmogorov, 221.

  ♦ “A NEW CONCEPTION OF THE NOTION ‘RANDOM’”: “On the Logical Foundations of Information Theory and Probability Theory,” Problems of Information Transmission 5, no. 3 (1969): 1–4.

  ♦ HE DREAMED OF SPENDING HIS LAST YEARS: V. I. Arnold, “On A. N. Kolmogorov,” in A. N. Kolmogorov and A. N. Shiryaev, Kolmogorov in Perspective, 94.

  ♦ “THE PARADOX ORIGINALLY TALKS ABOUT ENGLISH”: Gregory J. Chaitin, Thinking About Gödel and Turing: Essays on Complexity, 1970–2007 (Singapore: World Scientific, 2007), 176.

  ♦ “IT DOESN’T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE WHICH PARADOX”: Gregory J. Chaitin, “The Berry Paradox,” Complexity 1, no. 1 (1995): 26; “Paradoxes of Randomness,” Complexity 7, no. 5 (2002): 14–21.

  ♦ “ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY IS LIKE GOD”: Interview, Gregory J. Chaitin, 14 September 2009.

  ♦ “GOD NOT ONLY PLAYS DICE”: Foreword to Cristian S. Calude, Information and Randomness: An Algorithmic Perspective (Berlin: Springer, 2002), viii.

  ♦ “CHARMINGLY CAPTURED THE ESSENCE”: Joseph Ford, “Directions in Classical Chaos,” in Directions in Chaos, ed. Hao Bai-lin (Singapore: World Scientific, 1987), 14.

  ♦ THE INFORMATION PACKING PROBLEM: Ray J. Solomonoff, “The Discovery of Algorithmic Probability,” Journal of Computer and System Sciences 55, no. 1 (1997): 73–88.

  ♦ “THREE MODELS FOR THE DESCRIPTION OF LANGUAGE”: Noam Chomsky, “Three Models for the Description of Language,” IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2, no. 3 (1956): 113–24.

  ♦ “THE LAWS OF SCIENCE THAT HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED”: Ray J. Solomonoff, “A Formal Theory of Inductive Inference,” Information and Control 7, no. 1 (1964): 1–22.

  ♦ “COCKTAIL SHAKER AND SHAKING VIGOROUSLY”: Foreword to Cristian S. Calude, Information and Randomness, vii.

  ♦ “IT IS PREFERABLE TO CONSIDER COMMUNICATION”: Gregory J. Chaitin, “Randomness and Mathematical Proof,” in Information, Randomness & Incompleteness, 4.

  ♦ “FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS OF INFORMATION THEORY”: Charles H. Bennett, “Logical Depth and Physical Complexity,” in The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey, ed. Rolf Herken (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 209–10.

  13. INFORMATION IS PHYSICAL

  ♦ “THE MORE ENERGY, THE FASTER THE BITS FLIP”: Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe (New York: Knopf, 2006), 44.

  ♦ “HOW DID THIS COME ABOUT?”: Christopher A. Fuchs, “Quantum Mechanics as Quantum Information (and Only a Little More),” arXiv:quant-ph/0205039v1, 8 May 2002, 1.

  ♦ “THE REASON IS SIMPLE”: Ibid., 4.

  ♦ “IT TEACHES US … THAT SPACE CAN BE CRUMPLED”: John Archibald Wheeler with Kenneth Ford, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics (New York: Norton, 1998), 298.

  ♦ “OTHERWISE PUT … EVERY IT”: “It from Bit” in John Archibald Wheeler, At Home in the Universe, Masters of Modern Physics, vol. 9 (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1994), 296.

  ♦ A PROBLEM AROSE WHEN STEPHEN HAWKING: Stephen Hawking, “Black Hole Explosions?” Nature 248 (1 March 1974), DOI:10.1038/248030a0, 30–31.

  ♦ PUBLISHING IT WITH A MILDER TITLE: Stephen Hawking, “The Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse,” Physical Review D 14 (1976): 2460–73; Gordon Belot et al., “The Hawking Information Loss Paradox: The Anatomy of a Controversy,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (1999): 189–229.

  ♦ “INFORMATION LOSS IS HIGHLY INFECTIOUS”: John Preskill, “Black Holes and Information: A Crisis in Quantum Physics,” Caltech Theory Seminar, 21 October 1994, http://www.theory.caltech.edu/~preskill/talks/blackholes.pdf (accessed 20 March 2010).

  ♦ “SOME PHYSICISTS FEEL THE QUESTION”: John Preskill, “Black Holes and the Information Paradox,” Scientific American (April 1997): 54.

  ♦ “I THINK THE INFORMATION PROBABLY GOES OFF”: Quoted in Tom S
iegfried, The Bit and the Pendulum: From Quantum Computing to M Theory—The New Physics of Information (New York: Wiley and Sons, 2000), 203.

  ♦ “THERE IS NO BABY UNIVERSE”: Stephen Hawking, “Information Loss in Black Holes,” Physical Review D 72 (2005): 4.

  ♦ THE “THERMODYNAMICS OF COMPUTATION”: Charles H. Bennett, “Notes on the History of Reversible Computation,” IBM Journal of Research and Development 44 (2000): 270.

  ♦ “COMPUTERS … MAY BE THOUGHT OF AS ENGINES”: Charles H. Bennett, “The Thermodynamics of Computation—a Review,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21, no. 12 (1982): 906.

  ♦ BACK-OF-THE-ENVELOPE CALCULATION: Ibid.

  ♦ ROLF LANDAUER: “Information Is Physical,” Physics Today 23 (May 1991); “Information Is Inevitably Physical,” in Anthony H. G. Hey, ed., Feynman and Computation (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002), 77.

  ♦ STRAIGHT AND NARROW OLD IBM TYPE: Charles Bennett, quoted by George Johnson in “Rolf Landauer, Pioneer in Computer Theory, Dies at 72,” The New York Times, 30 April 1999.

  ♦ “YOU MIGHT SAY THIS IS THE REVENGE”: Interview, Charles Bennett, 27 October 2009.

  ♦ BENNETT AND HIS RESEARCH ASSISTANT: J. A. Smolin, “The Early Days of Experimental Quantum Cryptography,” IBM Journal of Research and Development 48 (2004): 47–52.

  ♦ “WE SAY THINGS SUCH AS ‘ALICE SENDS BOB’ ”: Barbara M. Terhal, “Is Entanglement Monogamous?” IBM Journal of Research and Development 48, no. 1 (2004): 71–78.

  ♦ FOLLOWING AN INTRICATE AND COMPLEX PROTOCOL: A detailed explanation can be found in Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Codebreaking (London: Fourth Estate, 1999); it takes ten pages of exquisite prose, beginning at 339.

  ♦ “STAND BY: I’LL TELEPORT YOU SOME GOULASH”: IBM advertisement, Scientific American (February 1996), 0–1; Anthony H. G. Hey, ed., Feynman and Computation, xiii; Tom Siegfried, The Bit and the Pendulum, 13.

  ♦ “UNFORTUNATELY THE PREPOSTEROUS SPELLING QUBIT”: N. David Mermin, Quantum Computer Science: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4.

  ♦ “CAN QUANTUM-MECHANICAL DESCRIPTION OF PHYSICAL REALITY”: Physical Review 47 (1935): 777–80.

  ♦ “EINSTEIN HAS ONCE AGAIN EXPRESSED HIMSELF”: Wolfgang Pauli to Werner Heisenberg, 15 June 1935, quoted in Louisa Gilder, The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn (New York: Knopf, 2008), 162.

  ♦ “THAT WHICH REALLY EXISTS IN B”: Albert Einstein to Max Born, March 1948, in The Born-Einstein Letters, trans. Irene Born (New York: Walker, 1971), 164.

  ♦ IT TOOK MANY MORE YEARS BEFORE THE LATTER: Asher Peres, “Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen, and Shannon,” arXiv:quant-ph/0310010 v1, 2003.

  ♦ “TERMINOLOGY CAN SAY IT ALL”: Christopher A. Fuchs, “Quantum Mechanics as Quantum Information (and Only a Little More”: arXiv: quant-ph/1003.5209 v1, 26 March 2010: 3.

  ♦ BENNETT PUT ENTANGLEMENT TO WORK: Charles H. Bennett et al., “Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State Via Dual Classical and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Channels,” Physical Review Letters 70 (1993): 1895.

  ♦ “SECRET! SECRET! CLOSE THE DOORS”: Richard Feynman, “Simulating Physics with Computers,” in Anthony H. G. Hey, ed., Feynman and Computation, 136.

  ♦ “FEYNMAN’S INSIGHT”: Interview, Charles H. Bennett, 27 October 2009.

  ♦ “A PRETTY MISERABLE SPECIMEN”: N. David Mermin, Quantum Computer Science, 17.

  ♦ RSA ENCRYPTION: named after its inventors, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman.

  ♦ THEY ESTIMATED THAT THE COMPUTATION: T. Kleinjung, K. Aoki, J. Franke, et al., “Factorization of a 768-bit RSA modulus,” Eprint archive no. 2010/006, 2010.

  ♦ “QUANTUM COMPUTERS WERE BASICALLY A REVOLUTION”: Dorit Aharonov, panel discussion “Harnessing Quantum Physics,”18 October 2009, Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Ontario; and e-mail message 10 February 2010.

  ♦ “MANY PEOPLE CAN READ A BOOK”: Charles H. Bennett, “Publicity, Privacy, and Permanence of Information,” in Quantum Computing: Back Action, AIP Conference Proceeding 864 (2006), ed. Debabrata Goswami (Melville, N.Y.: American Institute of Physics), 175–79.

  ♦ “IF SHANNON WERE AROUND NOW”: Charles H. Bennett, interview, 27 October 2009.

  ♦ “TO WORK OUT ALL THE POSSIBLE MIRRORED ROOMS”: Shannon interview with Anthony Liversidge, Omni (August 1987), in Claude Elwood Shannon, Collected Papers, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), xxxii.

  ♦ A MODEST TO-DO LIST: John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1989), 368.

  14. AFTER THE FLOOD

  ♦ “SUPPOSE WITHIN EVERY BOOK”: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 394.

  ♦ “THE UNIVERSE (WHICH OTHERS CALL THE LIBRARY)”: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1962), 54.

  ♦ “IT IS CONJECTURED THAT THIS BRAVE NEW WORLD”: Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Labyrinths, 8.

  ♦ “OUR HERESIARCH UNCLE”: William Gibson, “An Invitation,” introduction to Labyrinths, xii.

  ♦ “WHAT A STRANGE CHAOS”: Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1838), 111.

  ♦ “NO THOUGHT CAN PERISH”: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Power of Words” (1845), in Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 823–24.

  ♦ “IT WOULD EMBRACE IN THE SAME FORMULA”: Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, trans. Frederick Wilson Truscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory (New York: Dover, 1951).

  ♦ “IN TURNING OUR VIEWS”: Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 44.

  ♦ “THE ART OF PHOTOGENIC DRAWING”: Nathaniel Parker Willis, “The Pencil of Nature: A New Discovery,” The Corsair 1, no. 5 (April 1839): 72.

  ♦ “IN FACT, THERE IS A GREAT ALBUM OF BABEL”: Ibid., 71.

  ♦ “THE SYSTEM OF THE ‘UNIVERSE AS A WHOLE’ ”: Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Minds and Machines 59, no. 236 (1950): 440.

  ♦ “SUCH A BLAZE OF KNOWLEDGE AND DISCOVERY”: H. G. Wells, A Short History of the World (San Diego: Book Tree, 2000), 97.

  ♦ “THE ROMANS BURNT THE BOOKS OF THE JEWS”: Isaac Disraeli, Curiosities of Literature (London: Routledge & Sons, 1893), 17.

  ♦ “ALL THE LOST PLAYS OF THE ATHENIANS!”: Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (London: Samuel French, 1993), 38.

  ♦ “IF YOU WANT TO WRITE ABOUT FOLKLORE”: “Wikipedia: Requested Articles,” http://web.archive.org/web/20010406104800/www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Requested_articles (accessed 4 April 2001).

  ♦ “AGING IS WHAT YOU GET”: Quoted by Nicholson Baker in “The Charms of Wikipedia,” New York Review of Books 55, no. 4 (20 March 2008). The same anonymous user later struck again, vandalizing the entries on angioplasty and Sigmund Freud.

  ♦ “IT HAS NEVER BEEN SPREAD OUT, YET”: Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (London: Macmillan, 1893), 169.

  ♦ “THIS IS AN OBJECT IN SPACE, AND I’VE SEEN IT”: Interview, Jimmy Wales, 24 July 2008.

  ♦ “DIE SCHRAUBE AN DER HINTEREN LINKEN BREMSBACKE”: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Die_Schraube_an_der_hinteren_linken_Bremsbacke_am_Fahrrad_von_Ulrich_Fuchs (accessed 25 July 2008).

  ♦ “A PLAN ENTIRELY NEW”: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3rd edition, title page; cf. Richard Yeo, Encyclopædic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 181.

  ♦ “MANY TOPICS ARE BASED ON THE RELATIONSHIP”: “Wikipedia: What Wikipedia Is Not,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not (accessed 3 August 2008).

  ♦ “HE READ FOR METAPHYSICS”: Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, chapter 51.

  ♦ “I BEGAN STANDING WITH MY COMPUTER OPEN”: Nicholson Baker, “The Charms of Wikipe
dia.”

  ♦ “A HAMADRYAD IS A WOOD-NYMPH”: John Banville, The Infinities (London: Picador, 2009), 178.

  ♦ “MADE UP OF SYLLABLES THAT APPEAR”: Deming Seymour, “A New Yorker at Large,” Sarasota Herald, 25 August 1929.

  ♦ BY 1934 THE BUREAU WAS MANAGING A LIST: “Regbureau,” The New Yorker (26 May 1934), 16.

  ♦ AS THE HISTORIAN BRIAN OGILVIE HAS SHOWN: Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

  ♦ SCANDIX, PECTEN VENERIS, HERBA SCANARIA: Ibid., 173.

  ♦ CATALOGUE OF 6,000 PLANTS: Caspar Bauhin; Ibid., 208.

  ♦ “THE NAME OF A MAN IS LIKE HIS SHADOW”: Ernst Pulgram, Theory of Names (Berkeley, Calif.: American Name Society, 1954), 3.

  ♦ “A SCIENTIST’S IDEA OF A SHORT WAY”: Michael Amrine, “ ‘Megabucks’ for What’s ‘Hot,’ ” The New York Times Magazine, 22 April 1951.

  ♦ “IT’S AS IF YOU KNEEL TO PLANT THE SEED”: Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (New York: Knopf, 2010), 8.

  ♦ SERVER FARMS PROLIFERATE: Cf. Tom Vanderbilt, “Data Center Overload,” The New York Times Magazine, 14 June 2009.

  ♦ LLOYD CALCULATES: Seth Lloyd, “Computational Capacity of the Universe,” Physical Review Letters 88, no. 23 (2002).

  15. NEW NEWS EVERY DAY

  ♦ “SORRY FOR ALL THE UPS AND DOWNS”: http://www.andrewtobias.com/bkoldcolumns/070118.html (accessed 18 January 2007).

  ♦ “GREAT MUTATION”: Carl Bridenbaugh, “The Great Mutation,” American Historical Review 68, no. 2 (1963): 315–31.

  ♦ “NOTWITHSTANDING THE INCESSANT CHATTER”: Ibid., 322.

  ♦ A THOUSAND PEOPLE IN THE BALLROOM: “Historical News,” American Historical Review 63, no. 3 (April 1963): 880.

  ♦ TENDED TO SLOT THE PRINTING PRESS: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 25.

  ♦ “DATA COLLECTION, STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS”: Ibid., xvi.