The Word, The Information, The Bit (III)

This is the 3^rd blog in this essay series reflecting on James Gleick’s book THE INFORMATION: A HISTORY, A THEORY, A FLOOD. The first blog is The Word, The Information, The Bit (1) and the immediately preceding blog is The Word, The Information, The Bit (II).

The 20^th Century saw in science an increased understanding of the importance of entropy and randomness in physics. The concept of randomness had implications for other fields as well including biology and the emerging science of encryption and information theory. It became clear that the standard for science – Newtonian physics – did not accurately describe the atomic and sub-atomic worlds. At the atomic level the universe did not function like a predictable machine, but rather there existed a randomness in motion, and a tendency for all things to move toward entropy – a total randomness.

Living things actually survive by undoing the randomness apparent in the atomic world. “In other words, the organism sucks orderliness from it surroundings.” Or, as Erwin Schroedinger (d. 1961) described it: “To put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.” (p 283) In many ways, living things are computing information from their surroundings, turning randomness into life with its ordered cells.

The world of physics and mathematics and the study of biology and even human language was becoming more clearly the same study, all of it having a measurable mathematical and logical basis. Randomness it was realized may not mean blind chance, since it to contained measurable information.

“’Chance is only the measure of our ignorance,’ Henri Poincare famously said. ‘Fortuitous phenomena are by definition those whose laws we do not know.’ … such phenomena as the scattering of raindrops, their causes physically determined but so numerous and complex as to be unpredictable. In physics—or whatever natural processes seem unpredictable—apparent randomness maybe noise or may arise from deeply complex dynamics.” (p 326)

It reminds me a great deal of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s (d. 1881) argument that the apparent randomness of world events which caused some to disbelieve in God caused him to think that there is an orderliness to the world and a logic which is beyond human rationality. It thus spoke to him that there was a God whose logic and rational is simply beyond our capacity to comprehend. We think we can know all there is to know and thus can understand everything. Even modern science says this is not true. That there is mystery in the universe is not merely a mystical thought of religion.

Modern information theory and quantum physics emerge from this history of information – from the spoken word, to the printed word, to the electronic word. All of the inventions related to the word – from writing to printing thus have shaped the very way we understand the universe. That is why it is somewhat amazing to me that Gleick only gives honorable mention to Gutenberg’s printing press. Johannes Gutenberg (d 1468) doesn’t even make the index though he does acknowledge that Elizabeth Eisenstein in her two volume THE PRINTING PRESS AS AN AGENT OF CHANGE places “Gutenberg’s invention at center stage: the shift from script to print.” (p 399) (And many know already that the state of Ohio no longer requires the teaching of script writing for students – typing has totally replaced the use of script. Will we soon be meeting literate people who no longer can sign their name?)

“As a duplicating machine, the printing press not only made texts cheaper and more accessible; its real power was to make them stable. ‘Scribal culture,’ Eisenstein wrote, was ‘constantly enfeebled by erosion, corruption, and loss.’ … Before print, scripture was not truly fixed.” (p 400)

“Scribal error” which is thought to have introduced into the text of Scriptures the variations which modern scholar’s debate can possibly be eliminated by the printing press which produces many exact same copies. Now as never before people around the world can read the exact same text without variation. But it has introduced into biblical scholarship an anachronistic thinking – we now read the text as if it has always been exactly like the one we are reading. It makes us rethink the text as if the physical words are sacred rather than the ideas which they simply and symbolically mimic, reflect or capture. We create (not re-create!) what we think is the most perfect text of Scripture only to realize that no ancient interpreter of Scripture had the exact text we have since ours is now a hybridization of all the “best texts” available to us.