The Information

A wagon with spoked wheels carries not only grain or freight from place to place; it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels from mind to mind.”

But it was only the second most significant development of that year. The transistor was only hardware.
An invention even more profound and more fundamental came in a monograph spread across seventy-nine pages of The Bell System Technical Journal in July and October. No one bothered with a press release. It carried a title both simple and grand—“A Mathematical Theory of Communication”—and the message was hard to summarize. But it was a fulcrum around which the world began to turn. Like the transistor, this development also involved a neologism: the word bit, chosen in this case not by committee but by the lone author, a thirty-two-year-old named Claude Shannon. The bit now joined the inch, the pound, the quart, and the minute as a determinate quantity—a fundamental unit of measure.
But measuring what? “A unit for measuring information,” Shannon wrote, as though there were such a thing, measurable and quantifiable, as information.

Each new information technology, in its own time, set off blooms in storage and transmission.

Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us—not anymore. We humans, alone among the earth’s organic creatures, live in both worlds at once. It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the needed extrasensory perception. We are aware of the many species of information. We name their types sardonically, as though to reassure ourselves that we understand: urban myths and zombie lies. We keep them alive in air-conditioned server farms. But we cannot own them. When a jingle lingers in our ears, or a fad turns fashion upside down, or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, who is master and who is slave?

thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfectly without booke, and where every Letter standeth: as b neere the beginning, n about the middest, and t toward the end. Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to finde, begin with a then looke in the beginning of this Table, but if with v looke towards the end. Againe, if thy word beginne with ca looke in the beginning of the letter c but if with cu then looke toward the end of that letter. And so of all the rest. &c.

Qubits cannot be watched as they do their exponentially many operations in parallel; measuring that shadow-mesh of possibilities reduces it to a classical bit. Quantum information is fragile. The only way to learn the result of a computation is to wait until after the quantum work is done.
Quantum information is like a dream—evanescent, never quite existing as firmly as a word on a printed page. “Many people can read a book and get the same message,” Bennett says, “but trying to tell people about your dream changes your memory of it, so that eventually you forget the dream and remember only what you said about it.”♦ Quantum erasure, in turn, amounts to a true undoing: “One can fairly say that even God has forgotten.”

The paper concluded sternly, “No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this.” He gave it the indelible name spukhafte Fernwirkung, “spooky action at a distance.”

In 1621 the Oxford scholar Robert Burton (who amassed one of the world’s largest private libraries, 1,700 books, but never a thesaurus) gave voice to the feeling:
I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c. daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of wed

Kolmogorov-Chaitin (KC) complexity is to mathematics what entropy is to thermodynamics: the antidote to perfection. Just as we can have no perpetual-motion machines, there can be no complete formal axiomatic systems.

So it is a message in an interstellar bottle. The message has no meaning, apart from its patterns, which is to say that it is abstract art: the first prelude of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, as played on the piano by Glenn Gould. More generally, perhaps the meaning is “There is intelligent life here.”