The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

Front Cover
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Mar 6, 2012 - Science - 544 pages

From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. 
 
Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live.

New York Times Notable Book
Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year
Winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
 

 

Contents

Prologue 338598
3
Drums That Talk
13
The Persistence of the Word
28
Two Wordbooks
51
To Throw the Powers of Thought into WheelWork
78
A Nervous System for the Earth
125
New Wires New Logic
168
Information Theory
204
Into the Meme Pool
310
The Sense of Randomness
324
Information Is Physical
355
After the Flood
373
New News Every Day
398
Epilogue
413
Acknowledgments
427
Bibliography
477

The Informational Turn
233
Entropy and Its Demons
269
Lifes Own Code
287

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2012)

JAMES GLEICK is our leading chronicler of science and technology, and the author of Chaos and Genius, both nominated for the National Book Award, and Isaac Newton, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. His books have been translated into thirty languages.

www.around.com


Bibliographic information