The Medium Is the Message Thomas J

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TECHNOLOGY The medium is the message Thomas J. Misa enjoys a history of communication tools, from talking drums to Twitter.

nformation is the paradigm of our time. Gleick acknowledges After decades of European puzzlement, Economies that once manufactured goods that the concept of John Carrington’s 1949 book The Talking now create value by processing informa- information and its Drums of Africa revealed all. There was no Ition. Global flows of money, ideas and news impacts are difficult telegraph-like Morse code within drum- determine which countries engage with to grasp, yet explains ming. African languages relied only partly on global society and which are left silently on our fascination with unitary sounds or ‘phonemes’ and more the sidelines. A skein of pervasive mobile seeing information as fundamentally on their intonation. Simply computing keeps us connected — instantly, the driver of just about altering their tones could transform the continuously, incessantly. James Gleick’s latest everything. phonemes for ‘he watched the riverbank’ book, The Information, examines the genesis Rather than tel- The Information: A into ‘he boiled his mother-in-law’. With History, A Theory, of the information society and the roots and egraphs or telephones, drum tones expressing the rising and falling S. HOWARD PHOTO: OF THE ARTIST; COURTESY A Flood consequences of information theory. Gleick begins with JAMES GLEICK pitches of African speech, drummers could Gleick is no stranger to demanding scien- ‘talking’ African Pantheon/Fourth accurately convey a complex message. And tific topics. His blockbuster Chaos (Penguin, drums. Because Afri- Estate: 2011. 544 pp. anyone whose ear was attuned could under- 1987) popularized Edward Lorenz’s math- can languages had $29.95/£25 stand it. Using this accessible analogy, Gleick ematics of complexity. He is also the biogra- hundreds of sounds, it deftly introduces the concepts of information pher of physicists Richard Feynman and Isaac seemed impossible to European observers that channels, intentional redundancy of mes- Newton. In The Information, he highlights complex messages could be conveyed using sages and the importance of error correction. the great surge of classifying and calculating drums that made only two sounds, pitched Gleick’s more technical treatment of often labelled as the industrial and scientific high and low. Yet for centuries, almost all Shannon and information theory is a recur- revolutions, and he profiles leading theorists, African people could understand the messages ring thread of the crucial middle chap- notably US mathematician Claude Shannon. that were broadcast by skilled drummers. ters. He serves up enlightening side views

Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Power Struggles: Scientific Authority and the Gutenberg to Gates Creation of Practical Electricity Before Edison Adrian Johns (Univ. Chicago Press, 2011; $22.50) Michael Brian Schiffer (MIT Press, 2011; $19) Intellectual piracy, as historian Adrian Johns explains, is Behavioural archaeologist Michael Schiffer nothing new. From the invention of the printing press investigates electricity technologies before to modern file-sharing, Johns explores the wars that Thomas Edison’s success. He shows why some have arisen over intellectual property rights. (See made an impact while others failed, and the role Steven Shapin’s review: Nature 466, 563; 2010.) of scientific authority in determining their fate.

had evolved into electronic computers. and mathematician Warren Weaver, The Shannon was the link between algebra Mathematical Theory of Communication and switches. He saw that the on–off states (University of Illinois Press, 1949). of telephone relays resembled the algebra Having engagingly assembled informa- originally conceived by George Boole in the tion theory, Gleick might have examined its 1850s, with its now-familiar notation of ones many ramifications in the mathematics of and zeroes and ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘not’ operators, coding theory, data compression and error and that immense systems of telephone correction that underpins everything from relays could be analysed through Boolean mobile phones to DVDs. Instead, he treats algebra. Shannon also showed that logical information more metaphorically, covering problems, such as adding two binary num- the founding of cybernetics, the genetic code bers together, could be modelled exactly of DNA and the birth of quantum infor- using telephone relays — and, soon enough, mation science and the allure of quantum vacuum tubes, transistors and semiconduc- computing. His asides on the editing history tor chips too. Having grounded modern of Wikipedia articles, although entertaining, computing in this way, Shannon created begin to stretch the interpretive framework. ‘An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics’, as his A final substantive chapter surveys our doctoral thesis was titled, in 1940. predicament of information overload, A full-blown information theory arrived the flood of the book’s subtitle: too many soon after. Following a year at the Institute genomes, sky surveys and climate models, for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, let alone e-mails. He confronts social media Size Matters: Alphabet (2005) by Dalton Ghetti. Shannon joined Bell Telephone Laborato- such as Twitter, describing it as “banality ries full-time in 1941 and worked on war- shrink-wrapped, enforcing triviality by to Babylonian mathematics, the Oxford time cryptography and fire-control projects. limiting all messages to 140 characters”. English Dictionary, Charles Babbage’s Shrouded in secrecy, the wartime work Gleick admirably raises the question of mechanical computers, telegraph codes, the introduced him to British computer scien- how information relates to meaning and ‘completeness’ of formal mathematics, war- tist Alan Turing (they had tea together for semantics, which Shannon specifically time cryptography and especially the tele two months but could not discuss their code ruled out of scope in his theory, yet Gleick phone system, which provided a focus for work), and linked his thinking with math- mostly inclines towards instances of verbal Shannon’s work. He also gives apt summa- ematician Norbert Wiener’s broadly similar and mathematical thinking. “The written ries of Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan and theory of the role of randomness or ‘entropy’ word — the persistent word — was a pre- other commentators on the information age. in information. All communication, Shan- requisite for conscious thought as we under- The narrative of Shannon’s place in infor- non decided, resembled coded messages stand it,” Gleick suggests. An anecdote from mation theory is well known to historians. sent through a noisy channel: distortion Feynman opens up this tidy world: “Think- Shannon, a distant relative of Thomas and noise battled against redundancy and ing is nothing but talking to yourself,” he Edison, grew up in rural northern Michi- bandwidth. He defined these terms math- once remarked. “Oh yeah?” countered a gan, studied electrical engineering and ematically. Shannon gained international friend. “Do you know the crazy shape of mathematics at the University of Michigan, acclaim after publishing two famous tech- the crankshaft in a car? Now tell me: how then went to the Massachusetts Institute of nical articles in which he named the bit did you describe it when you were talking Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Here, (short for ‘binary digit’, first coined in a Bell to yourself?” Thinking in this spatial way, after operating Vannevar Bush’s massive Labs memo by statistician John Tukey), and Feynman set the stage for nanotechnology mechanical differential analyser and work- after writing a popular book with engineer in his article in Popular Science in Novem- ing at Bell Telephone Laboratories during ber 1960, titled ‘There’s Plenty of Room the summer break, he started work on at the Bottom: How to Build an Automo- his master’s thesis: ‘A Symbolic Analysis bile Smaller than this Dot.’ Semantics and of Relay and Switching Circuits’. It was spatial thinking might be considered for a accepted by MIT in 1937 and published a new, generative theory of information to year later. Psychologist Howard Gardner enhance Shannon’s. ■ called it “possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master’s Thomas J. Misa is director of the thesis of the century”. Telephone switch- Charles Babbage Institute at the ing systems at the time were composed University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, (1997) BY DALTON GHETTI. GHETTI. DALTON (1997) BY of thousands of electromechanical Minnesota 55455, USA.

CHAIN S. HOWARD PHOTO: OF THE ARTIST; COURTESY relays; within two decades or so, they e-mail: [email protected]

Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience The Eerie Silence Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb and Catherine Paul Davies (Mariner Books, 2011; $15.95) Westfall (Univ. Chicago Press, 2011; $30) Astrophysicist Paul Davies describes the 50-year For 40 years, the Fermi National Accelerator Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence project. He Laboratory in Illinois has stood at the frontier of proposes other approaches, from scouring Earth high-energy physics. The book charts the rise of for microscopic aliens to seeking intelligence this institution, detailing the difficulties of balancing on planets beyond the Solar System. (See Chris pioneering science with tightened budgets. McKay’s review: Nature 464, 34; 2010.)