James Gleick

The book begins with a discussion of African talking drums (a marvel of communication in an era where technology hadn't even kicked off) and that should be enough to rope you in. The historical narrative format is perhaps the strongest point of this book. It keeps you interested as you see how the idea of information evolved across time and you get to see the lives of many eminent personalities who contributed to this field, the two most prominent being Charles Babbage and Claude show more Shannon.

Information theory is extremely relevant to the world today and finds place in mathematics (coding theory), computer science and electronics and communication. This book is by no means an easy read. It's better if you have a sound knowledge of some concepts beforehand but still Gleick has done a great job at explaining everything with as much clarity as possible. show less

Gleick needs a time machine. He wants his reader to put him or herself back in the 1990s as much as possible when reading What Just Happened. We need to remember the internet as it was just starting out. Portable phones. Pagers. ATMs. The essays cover bugs in Microsoft (essays written in August 1992 and again in June of 1997), the transformation of cellphone communication, the question of caller ID and ethics, the Y2K Crisis (for which Gleick apologizes for reporting impending doom four show more years prior), the idea of anonymous spending is only possible with cash (Think about it. No other form of money is without identifiers of some sort.), humorous password creations - all with a snarky tone that is just delightful.
Gleick's opinion of internet pornography and its future is laughable. My favorite section was when Gleick unpacked an alert sent by MSN, pointing out vague language, half truths, cloudy communication, deliberate mis-directions, down playing failures, all with skillful ambiguity and clever concealment of the truth. Humor aside, Gleick makes you think about how far we have come. show less

Sir Isaac Newton ranks among history's greatest geniuses. For inventing modern physics. For overturning Aristotle's hegemony upon thought. For co-inventing calculus (as an introduction to physics). For being more into theology and alchemy than physics.

His treasure-trove of personal writings - kept hidden until near the middle of the twentieth century - show this man to be, like Luther before him, the last of the great medievalists who birthed the movement of modernity. With Newton came the show more Industrial Revolution and a rigid system that Einsteinianism had to loosen. He obsessed over thought after thought, most based on alchemy and Arian/Gnostic theology (not orthodox Trinitarianism), until modern physics was birthed, and with it a deductive mechanism from first "principles."

He was born the son of an illiterate father whom he never knew. He seemed destined to become a farmer, but instead, privately reckoned physics into being at Cambridge. He never married. He was haunted by lust. He became rich by overseeing the conversion of Britain's Mint. He left no will, was close to none, was a recluse, and wrote brilliantly.

He was a magician, an alchemist, and a heretical theologian. He dabbled in unreason to give birth to reason. He later became an authoritarian over scientific thought. He feuded with Leibnitz, a feud which in some senses persists to this day. (They both are right in their claims, and humanity is the big loser of the argument. They should be seen as independent co-founders of calculus.)

His Principia removed Aristotle's impulsivity and set gravity as the central cause of all of motion. He derived calculus to explain its movement in a universal language. He made mathematics the foundational language of humanity.

It wasn't until Einstein that science returned to solving problems as its fundamental method. Even Darwin proposed a universal system, not a solution. With Einstein, relativity (which was the popular version of the physical laws Einstein proposed, much as mechanism was the popular import of Newtonianism) became in imbibed by Western consciousness. Now, scientists see things through a team spirit relative to one's position in work. Few claim to be systemic masters any longer, as if there were a system to master in the first place.

The rigid system of Newtonianism stays with us on the outskirts. Every time someone exerts a will to claim overarching knowledge (which is, in Newton's world, power), they claim Newton's authoritarian dark side. Trump, old-school Calvinism, old-school capitalism, moralism. There is right and wrong for Newton. Again, it took an Einstein to relativize everything.

I think the real Isaac Newton would have liked to know that sage of Princeton Albert Einstein. It's unfortunate that I also dream that Newton would have found much reason to argue with him, much as Newton privately argued with Leibnitz in his own day and Einstein argued with Quantum Mechanics for the second-half of his life. At least Newton was private in his argumentation. He preferred not to argue publicly. That's a character trait we can all learn from, especially in a post-Newtonian, post-Einsteinian world. show less

An interesting book, but best read as a superficial skim through information theory, with detours to related topics like encryption theory, Godel's Theorem, etc. As someone who already knew the basics I found it a fast and interesting read.

However, the book contians at least one significant flaw: Gleick says that Godel's Theorem states that mathematics is self-contradictory. This is a nettlesome popular error (actually two errors) pertaining to Godel's Theorem.
First, the theorem does not show more apply to all mathematics, only to formal systems of a certain kind.
Second, the theorem does not state that such formal systems must be self-contradictory. It states that any such system either has self-contradictions or cannot prove some true statements that are statable in the system.
The popular misconception of Godel's Theorem - that it asserts the internal incoherence of all mathematics - drives me up a wall because it is often seized upon by anti-intellectual boneheads to argue that logical reasoning is futile and similarly fuck-witted nonsense. Gleick was obligated to research this topic more thoroughly before pontificating on it.

This shortcoming also led me to take everything else Gleick said with a certain measure of skepticism - I mean even more than the default level of skepticism for non-fiction - and if you read it you should approach it that way too. show less