The Information

Review

Reading this was not only an intellectual delight, but it reignited my sense of wonder and enthusiasm about modern technology. Gleick picks up the thread of 'information' and follows it through mathematics, engineering, history, formal logic, quantum mechanics, genetics, computing, philosophy, and of course information theory. Curiously enough, I felt like I learned a lot more about how disciplines and thinkers share the principles of information theory than I did about the topic itself; it was kind of like attending a friend's party and spending most of your time with other guests instead of the host.

Where, then, is any particular gene—say, the gene for long legs in humans? This is a little like asking where is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E minor. Is it in the original handwritten score? The printed sheet music? Any one performance—or perhaps the sum of all performances, historical and potential, real and imagined? The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the air; nor grooves etched in vinyl or pits burned in CDs; nor even the neuronal symphonies stirred up in the brain of the listener. The music is the information.