The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Ratings36
Average rating4.2
15
Ratings36
Average rating4.2
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood begins with the tale of colonial European explorers and their fascination with African talking drums and their observed use to send complex and widely understood messages back and forth between villages far apart, and over even longer distances by relay. The book then covers informational implications of technologies from drum signaling to the long distance telephone.
Starting with symbolic written language, The Information examines the history of intellectual insights central to the development of information theory, detailing key figures responsible such as Claude Shannon, Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and John Archibald Wheeler.
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Reviews with the most likes.
Excellent history of information, from talking drums to quantum physics.
Gleick speaks of things one has heard of before, but he does it in such an elegant and explanatory style, rich of anecdotes and never boring. He tells the story of information, its transmission, compression, quantification, definition and spins a web from early telegraph technologies, to redundancies in language, Claude Shannon's formula, how information ends up being entropy and the opposite of entropy, universal Turing machines, information never not being physical and today's information overload.
Solid and influential. The last 20% is pretty well-known if you're into technology, but the middle section and the account of signal analysis is excellent.
