Book of the week: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

(Pantheon, $30)

James Gleick’s publisher might be justified in billing him as America’s “leading chronicler of science and modern technology,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. With The Information, the erudite author of Chaos and Genius has written a 500-page book “so ambitious, illuminating, and sexily theoretical” that even the most intelligent readers lured to it may find it impossible to fully digest. Principally, it’s a history of humanity that puts our engagement with information at its center: From our creation of written language to the discovery that living cells are in essence processors of DNA data, we are, in Gleick’s formulation, “creatures of the information.” Yes, “the information,” said Geoffrey Nunberg, also in the Times. For Gleick, it’s appropriate that we begin speaking of “the information” the same way we already speak of “the universe.”

Gleick’s narrative covers 5,000 years of human history, said John Horgan in The Wall Street Journal. But its turning point comes in 1948, when the father of information theory, Bell Laboratories scientist Claude Shannon, wrote a paper demonstrating that all information, regardless of meaning, could be expressed as a collection of binary digits, or “bits,” with each digit representing an answer to a yes or no question. Shannon’s idea gave us not just the ones and zeroes of computer code, said Joshua Rothman in The Boston Globe. It was “the crucial insight that united mathematics, engineering, even biology and physics.” Shannon had made it possible to see code encrypted in cells, in atoms, in the distant cosmos. “At the heart of Gleick’s book is a sense” that we hadn’t just found a new tool for understanding our surroundings, but that we had stumbled upon the link between all things.

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Gleick’s “deeply hopeful book” is in part “a celebration of human ingenuity,” said Nicholas Carr in TheDailyBeast.com. “But it ends on an ambivalent note.” By Shannon’s definition, the world now produces more information in 48 hours than it did throughout all human history to 2003. Still, Gleick “remains relatively sanguine” about our capacity to navigate the flood of data that information theory unleashed, said David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. If the universe is information, it has always been producing a deluge of data, and humans have always found patterns of meaning in the waters visible to us. Homo sapiens knows that it’s defined by a fundamental “need to process and know.” That need is at the core of who we are.