James Gleick

The Information

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Winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2012, the world's leading prize for popular science writing.
We live in the information age. But every era of history has had its own information revolution: the invention of writing, the composition of dictionaries, the creation of the charts that made navigation possible, the discovery of the electronic signal, the cracking of the genetic code.
In ‘The Information’ James Gleick tells the story of how human beings use, transmit and keep what they know. From African talking drums to Wikipedia, from Morse code to the ‘bit’, it is a fascinating account of the modern age’s defining idea and a brilliant exploration of how information has revolutionised our lives.
This book is currently unavailable
736 printed pages
Publication year
2011
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Impressions

  • oluramond2001shared an impression6 years ago
    🎯Worthwhile

  • Christy Mccowanshared an impression8 years ago
    👍Worth reading

Quotes

  • Lesha Ivanovskyhas quoted11 years ago
    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.”
  • dadapotokhas quoted8 years ago
    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.
  • mikastrahas quotedlast year
    Each new information technology, in its own time, set off blooms in storage and transmission.

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