related to twin falls like the opening of sun valley, the development of nevada and is a sort of thing. >> there's stories about twin falls, is there an example that you liked researching? >> it was all fascinating to me. i think one of the things that i really enjoyed was the focus on community that twin falls is still small enough area that communities are important and, i guess, because of my -- maybe my own southern roots in a small town, community is important. the constant focus on community and how to develop community to me is very, very interesting. >> you're not from idaho or from twin falls. what brought you out here and

got you interested in the book? >> well, i completed high school in ohio, and my family moved to california in 1962 after i graduated from high school. i came to college of southern idaho in 1969, and while i was doing any dissertation at the university of utah, i dealt with corrographers describing regions in england. that made me aware of the rich possibilities of understanding local history in terms of geography and all the different components of local history. ..

science writer james gleick discusses his latest work history of information beginning with the development of various alphabet's ending with what's expected next from the information age the author of chaos crackles the evolution how thoughts and knowledge have been passed from one to another throughout history. he talks with frank rose a contributing editor of wired magazine and the author of the art of emersion. >> host: james, thank you so much for joining us. >> guest: thank you for having us. >> host: i really enjoyed your book. it's been great fun to read.

now, one thing i was sort of fascinated by the year 1948, clearly that was a year so to speak and studying the states for the world we live in today that was the world that the transistor was invented and cannot with the information theory and published the book. what was it about that year? why did all these things come together did you think? >> that is the starting point for my book because i start the book in the middle, but it's the pivotal moment and i think that it's rare that we are able to pick one year and say this is the fulcrum and around which the whole modern world has turned but i believe that about 1948 and you have named the two

things that apparently coincidentally came out of bell labs in the same year the transistor and the information theory. it's a sort of central figure of my dhaka because of this starting point because in 1948 he published in in the obscure technical journal of the bell labs system to papers during the summer called a mathematical theory of communication. and then there became a book the mathematical theory of communication. the first time among other things of was the first time anyone used the word bit as a unit of measure for this stuff, information. why was it? he would go around reminding people are telling people that he was going to use this work in

a scientific way and he needed people to understand that while what was really did to the ordinary everyday sense of the word it was something different. he was going to make up something mathematical and, if he does. so, 1948 is i think not exactly the start of what we call the information age, but i would like to say it's the start of a time in which we began to realize all human history had been in the information age. >> host: how did he come up with the word that? where did that come from? >> guest: as far as everyone can tell it was invented by a statistician named john touky who worked at princeton for many years. i interviewed him because he was a roommate of richard feynman. he was a wonderful guy and there was a lot of discussion at the time about this not yet invented

a mythical quantity. it's short for by mary digit, and of course it's a nice little word that refers to something -- we know what it is, it is on or off, true or false. that connection already which lies at the heart is also due to shannon who wrote a master's thesis when he was barely 20-years-old in which he was getting a degree in electrical engineering and he wrote a thesis connecting the analysis of the electrical circuits with the symbolic logic from the 19th century. these were to ideas that seemed to any normal person the stove for one another in having different claims of the existence. electrical circuits, most people

are electrical engineers are doing things to do with hardware and resistance, and claude shannon was thinking of them in a completely abstract way where a circuit could be on or off and he made this connection that on or off could be the same as true or false and you could link circuits together and have logic all this is second nature if we know anything about computers because computers are built on this. this equivalence between circuitry of logic but this is where it was invented so the bit is the fundamental unit, the binary digit. so. >> host: the transistor, we know a lot about william who has been quite a notorious figure but we know less about claude shannon and the popular imagination. what was he like back then?

>> guest: he was something of a loner. he was shy. bell labs at that time had a big industrial building on west creaked. the building is still there downtown new york on the edge of greenwich village. in the old pictures you can see who the high line railroad line running through the stories of the building. >> host: you have pictures in your book. i love that picture. >> guest: right arm of this time, it was just after the war, most of bell labs worked out to marie hill and claude shannon who worked for the mathematics department kind of stayed behind on his own. >> host: dfa window? >> guest: i don't know if he had a window.

i know he was flirting with a young woman that worked across the street during the war but it was the old nabisco building the call it the cracker factory and he later married this woman, the shannon. because during the war he had done important work he worked on kurt cryptography and because bell labs was a unique institution where they believed in the value of pure research, because these things people left claude shannon alone. his managers didn't know exactly what he was working on but he just was allowed to do what he was doing and was apparently not particularly useful. unlike the transistor. the transistor everybody knew it was going to be a big deal and when i was announced the same year you mentioned the-workers

became immediately famous. a bell labs put out a press release. the transistor we now know replaced those hot vacuum tubes and enabled the miniaturization of electronics almost immediately there were transistor radios and then combined with of the technology at the integrated circuit it became the underpinning of our computer world. now we have billions of transistors literally in our pockets to rely can pull my device out of my pocket and i that you could, too read billions of transistors right there. shannon's fury which came out at the same time at first blush had nothing to do with that. it was a coincidence. he was thinking at least

officially about telephone wires, copper telephone wires his theory of communication was of great use in the coming up with techniques for compressing information and sending it efficiently over these analog lawyers for example in the presence of malaysia's. but while he solved a lot of these problems in an analog way, he simultaneously solved them in the digital way meaning its digital and in our world that makes it suitable for storage on all kind of new devices instead of just records we have compact discs which store many times more bits because they are

microscopic bits in screened with the police are on a silicon or some other material. by solving these problems both in analog and digital terms, shannon made a great leap forward for science that was just in the process of being born which was computer science. >> host: so at what point did the bits of information theory and the transistor connect? if it was entirely by accident or circumstance, happenstance in 1948, when they begin to intersect? >> guest: they began to converge very quickly. the 1950's, the early 50's and then on to the 60's saw the

birth of the digital computer into the beginning mentioned norbert wiener try he came in the beginning too. he was one of the people who were early on recognized the power were of these new machines and it became a popular sensation. we know what is on the cover of "time" magazine and a life magazine in the early 50's and people started to talk about thinking machines. there was a lot of buzz about them and this is long before there was any such thing. computers in those days were crude by modern standards. there were just a glorified calculating machines. but people can see the possibilities in part because of shannon's work, in part because of predecessors like alan turing who i write about as you know in some detail in the book he was

at the end of his career and was close to his tragic death, but he was thinking philosophically about whether these digital machines could ever think and if they could, how would we know? and of course a lot of people were terrified by that prospect. a lot of people didn't like the idea. shannon was one of those who for whatever reason was entirely comfortable with the idea and he didn't mind. i think that he essentially felt that we humans are more or less machines anyway. they had a fairly materialistic view of what we are so it didn't bother them to consider the possibility someday there would be electronic machines that could fit. but again, this was so far from the world we live in where it just this spring we saw on tv

ibm's machine playing in jeopardy and a revived that line of conversation. finally this genuine artificial intelligence. here was a task solving these funny jeopardy questions that smells like something that is involved the higher capacities. back in his time shannon was thinking about whether computers would ever play chess. you and i both remember when i was considered a real threshold. what machines ever begin to play chess as well as a human being everybody had realized computers wouldn't be all to solve problems by brute force they wouldn't be able to a list of possible moves there were too

many. it requires something like intelligence to play chess that ship has sailed. >> host: what is it about this to you think that in 1950 "time" magazine has i believe of of thinking machines on its cover them here we are 61 years later ibm plays a good game of jeopardy and suddenly it is the crowning moment of human achievement, never mind the question. it seems we are very eager to assign the idea of the power of thought to these machines at the same time we are kind of terrified by them.

>> guest: one thing that's happening as we move to bar something humans use to be good at is remembering things. even calculating numbers. it seems crazy now, but it used to require a lot of intelligence to remember things and to compute the first computers were humans. it wasn't until the 20th century there was a decent mechanical calculating machine. well, now because computers do these things so well we don't have to remember anything and we certainly don't have to calculate our arithmetic. we've got machines in our pockets for these purposes and psychologically i think what we do is downgrade the value of the skills we think well calculating, that's not

intelligent because you've got a machine for that. >> host: we can relearn if we want to, you and i, i am pretty sure, memory becomes a kind of brutal force sort of thing. this curious, you can train memory and people go around competing they can do that but it's a little bit parlor trick because in day-to-day life that skill is not required of us any more. we have so much help before we get computers we have writing and notebooks but now computers help us remember everything. at a dinner party having an argument with friends about who is the star of such and such movies it's only a matter of seconds before somebody is going to go to the keyboard and get the absolute truth answer

according to google. so what happens is the bar has moved and we need to look at some other skills that only humans can do writing poetry, composing music. it used to be playing chess, not any more until the spring maybe it was answering those wacky jeopardy questions we to leave it open with that problem has been sufficiently softened by the ibm's machine. it's sad in a way because less and less is reserved to us exclusively. more and more is done by computers. and so, the result of that is people worried. they look ahead and wondered whether anything is going to be left to us poor humans at all. >> host: yet at the same time it makes us much more powerful. it gives us the power to look at a fact within milliseconds,

something we were never able to do before and that's been true with every sort of advance. i was fascinated by, you know, very early in the book you sort of step back from the information theory to look at earlier forms of abstraction like they're written language, and it seems every time we developed a new system whether it is language or spoken language or written language, which is obviously more advanced or mathematics we move to a group will allow the destruction and that seems to be what's happened now what information.

what does this abstraction gives us? >> the connections you are making are exactly the reason that i think 1948 is such a turning point. we are able to look at all these things now and understand that there's been one story from the beginning. of these earlier technologies were technologies of information just like the ones we have now. we know the computer is information technology and we can look back and say the computer is a successor to various other devices and one way it's a successor to a calculating machine but in another way it's a successor to the television and the phonograph record and maybe even to the book because we are using a computer to help us make use of these different forms of information as we now call it so

that we look back and we can say the telegraph was an information technology and before that the printing press and before that with the invention of writing itself was the creation of a technology of information as i say one of the things these inventions have uncommon is new levels of abstraction. the point about writing is to take something but was already a set of symbols, spoken language and encoded in a new form it could be in pictorial form as in the writing systems that were invented in asia and or it can be encoded a bit later in alphabetical format where the symbols don't refer directly to the words for the idea is a unit

of sound, that's more abstract. a chinese character that represents the word cow is connected to the cowal may be more directly than the three letters of the alphabet that spells the word, which don't refer to anything except sound. if we become good readers they aren't even sounds. then another leap of abstraction begins as a dozen of these technologies. the telegraph required coding. it's not an accident that samuel morris's name is attached to his code. when we talk about morse code he may or may not have been the

inventor of the telegraph, in fact he wasn't really but he was the inventor of the code and gives a brilliant idea. it solved the problem people were trying to solve all over europe. how do you take language either spoken or written and comfort to a form suitable for transmission over electrical wires. you can imagine a lot of ways of doing that. it's hard to imagine them now because what we of the solution was it was powerful opening and closing the electrical circuit but before that people involved, people can up with solutions involving mike metz, the had clocked faces and a needle would move so you could move the needle at one end of the wire and would move that the other end of the lawyers sort of like a ouija board.

there were telegraphs in england that worked that way for a while. on the other hand, if you heard these systems described, you might be forgiven for thinking anybody can use the thing with of the needles but the other you have to learn in the code are humans actually going to be able to learn to morris code? it is difficult and abstract yet we know that the -- they did. right up until our era of there were plenty of people who knew morris code and now there is a vantage, we know it is a vanishing skill but there might be a few people watching who are jumping up and down and saying i still need more us code, but i don't. >> host: how long does it take to learn more rusco? is it like learning to type?

>> guest: i never learned it. i take the you didn't either. but we know that it is a skill people internalize and became second nature very quickly. you could listen to the clatter of telegraph sound over the wires and just tear it translated in your head fluently. people who are fluent in more miscode or as good at understanding it as a person that is fluent in a foreign language. you can just understand the message. we also know that people had distinctive signatures you could recognize the voice of a particular telegraph operator. all of that has vanished. >> host: that's fascinating actually. the code can be so abstract and it can also be personalized at the same time. i find it fascinating your whole

discussion of the morse code and others in particular in light of the fact in world war ii they were involved in codebreaking which is of course something you touch on in the book and i am kind of particularly fascinated by that because of course the codes are of the process of encoding information and essentially taking the symbol system and making it even more abstract and complicated. what was the connection to you think between that and shannon's leader development of information theory? >> guest: i realized early on this was going to be a threat that would run through the story, this idea of code.

for one thing, it is a computer word. computer programmers are coders. that's not a coincidence. at the same time when shannon was a kid growing up in michigan he was fascinated by codes. one of the books he read and reread was a book of edgar allan poe's stories and edgar allan poe and his term was fascinated by code. there was a time in the middle of the 19th century in the u.s. when he was probably the nation's most famous cryptographer he would come up with challenges for cyphering published in newspapers. again in retrospect we understand why that is. there's this abstraction, this conversion of information from one language to another.

shannon himself did become a professional cryptographer during a war because he had to. as one of his assignments he was assigned to the top secret system which was a telephone system. it was a hot line connecting president roosevelt and winston churchill and shannon didn't invent the methodology that was used to encode the system. it was kind of that the one hand very clever and on the other hand incredibly clumsy and involved records with random malaise on them but identical phonograph records on opposite sides of the atlantic to the iran ignores to the tunnel is by one over here while roosevelt

talked and then i would be subtracted from the signal so churchill could listen and then they would go back and forth. but there was a theoretical problem of how to secure that was and that problem was assigned to claude shannon. they wanted him to figure out whether this could be broken. in the course of doing that he wrote an entire electorate mathematical theory of cryptography which was immediately classified as top secret and not published for years until after his mathematical theory of communication. we can see now we compare the two things they had a lot in common that in both cases shannon was thinking about converting information from one form to another in the case of cryptography from a public forum to a private hidden secret form

for concealment. but for communication was the same thing. converted to a different form not for the purpose of concealment but for the purpose of efficiently sending it over the communications channel and yet the problem was very similar. >> host: it was all about communications. >> guest: there was a moment during the war guinn alan turing who was simultaneously a secret cryptographer in england trail to the united states by whatever was available. the weaving in and out past the u-boats and visited bell labs for a few months and would have lunch with shannon, and neither one of them was allowed to talk about the secret project. so, she was cracking the german enigma code which was incredibly important. pos katella about the code it's

a fascinating story. >> guest: it's another one that wasn't known until long after the war because it was classified as secret. the germans had some elaborate codes that required machines, they look like the typewriters with a lot of lawyers, these enigma machines and a stroke of luck, some polish soldiers captured one of the german enigma machines and that in itself was not enough to make it possible to crack the code but it was a starting point so a big project was under way in the wind and alan turing was one of several mathematicians' involved in the code breaking project and he was the one who really did the most to solve the code once and then continue solving it to

construct machinery using electrical circuitry in the vacuum tubes and a lot of mechanical year to crack the code in a real time. every day they would change the code and the brits would crack the code again. it was incredibly important. it is arguable that this secret technological project did more to win the war for the allies than the manhattan project in creating the atomic bomb. i believe the answer to that is -- i don't believe it's arguable i believe it is true. >> and it obviously they had to -- the english should not have given away that they knew too much. so how did they sort of avoid it? >> guest: they had to be careful how they used the information

>> guest: these were the decisions churchill was making all the time. they were rightly paranoid about letting the germans know. i think they suspected of long before the war was over there was not that much they could do about. they had their u-boats of the needed to send messages. still, the fact that i -- i'm not a military historian so i can't give the chapter and verse to hinge on the knowledge that commanders had but we didn't know at the time that is the public didn't know at that time they were in possession of. >> host: i destructive you a bit. you were talking about touring

and shannon at bell labs in 1943. >> guest: fiscal 1943 before the war ended, and you just wish i wish i could have been a fly on the wall and i also wish they could have talked about the work they were doing because their interests had so much in common. both of them were thinking about computers long before there were such things. turing in particular had invented a purely abstract mathematical machine we call the turing machine or a particular the universal turing machine which is the computer that represents all of the computers. the machine access to only in his head because the transistor hadn't been invented yet and so

he imagined a paper tape and a little too device with a march across the tape planting symbols and reading the symbols of and we can think of it as the head of the tape recorder could. he had to imagine all this stuff typewriters could plant in a letter on to a piece of paper and turing set and match and a piece of paper is not to dimensional but it's one dimensional so the machine goes back and forth. he invented a computer that using the trust of these items, just the tip and the reading and

writing and some mechanism of storage storing the states of the machine can do anything that any other computer can do. any problem that can be solved by this machine by imaginary machine can be solved by a modern digital computer and vice versa. >> host: had he gotten to the idea what we now call this? >> guest: it was digital because they were discreet. it was not primary. it meant the next generation of mathematicians to whether you could make turing with just two symbols, zero and one day and it turns out that you can. >> host: so, working more or less side by side do you have

any sense of whether they knew or suspected? >> guest: i can only guess and i think they must have suspected. at least we know there are common interests that were apparent because they were talking about thinking machines. turing said something to a friend about how shannon wants to feed not just data to the mechanical brain, she wants to feed music to that. each in his own way were forward-looking men and the most of communicated that to each other even though they went their separate ways, turing returned to england and shannon continued to work in new york. >> host: did they ever meet again or communicate? >> guest: i don't think so. turing's story is very sad.

he should have been the national hero and instead he was a homosexual and in england and 1950's that was the legal. he was arrested, he was entrapped in a sorted little sting encounter. the way he was treated as barbaric to think about now. the psychological fury of the day this is the 1950's involved an idea that homosexuality is something that should be treated in particular with the injection of estrogen, female sex hormones which changed his body, the rudimentary state of depression, it was humiliating. you can imagine and he killed himself. >> host: one of the things to

get back to the idea of abstraction, you mentioned that in order to make the word information and work in the way that he wanted to, shannon had to be essentially if i'm not mistaken the richness of its meaning and he makes the point it's fascinating that newton had to do the same thing with words like math and so forth. but is it about stripping something of its meaning and making it more and more abstract sort of paradoxically that makes it powerful at the same time? >> guest: in the case of newton minow about newton because i wrote a biography of him about ten years ago a and i remember going through his early notebooks and looking at most of which are way over my head. i don't have the math to understand what he was doing technically, but i can

understand enough of the problem that he faced to watch him struggle with the meaning of words. this is when her newton as in his 20s working out of a farmhouse in the english countryside so cambridge university which he was attending was shut down and he was trying to create the laws of motion as we now understand them, and salt problems that led to his appreciation of gravity and he was writing things down for which there were no words. he was trying to, for example, mass an object has wheat, people knew some things were heavier than other things that math is not the same as wheat and newton's equations and he entered a concept separate from

gravity and he needed to feed it into the mathematical equations that involve force. force is another word. again, scientifically we know a little bit about applying for us to a stationary object or a moving object thanks to newton but you could see him struggling to come up with the words in latin and english because he was using both languages. and finally, she just picked words that existed in the language like force. force was a military thing. and he would say okay this is going to be in mathematical terms and i'm defining it in this mathematical way. cut forward three centuries and claude shannon i'm arguing was doing the same thing with the word information. he had in his head not just shannon the other engineers the idea that they were dealing with

something real, they were dealing with it when they sent it up and down telephone wires and wasn't just words and characters no a typewriter uses characters, a scribe wright's words. when you talking to a telephone, you are speaking in words, but what exactly has gone up and down the telephone wires? shannon who knew that there was electricity but it wasn't satisfactory to say we are dealing with electricity either. there was something else, not electricity or words or characters. what was it? well, we know the answer. the answer wasn't obvious. shannon was in the first person to start using the word information. and the information wasn't the only word shannon used. sometimes people would talk about intelligence. there's an early letter he writes to one of his teachers

he's around needed to work on a formulation having to do with the transmission of intelligence well, wrong word. the point is they need something. and for better or worse they chose the word in formation and shannon announced he would measure it in terms of bits and that made it a thing that scientists could work with. >> host: one of the splendid irony is licensed in your book was the idea here we are oblivious messy creatures, we have a terrie analog existence yet we use these types of abstractions to enable us to

look up the name of a movie star at a cocktail party and do anything practically. and i'm kind of fascinated by that. i'm also -- there are limits, and this is another thing you talk about, there are limits what this can do for us. you mentioned where does that leave us do you think? >> guest: there are a lot of ironies here and we are all either conscious or semiconscious. one of them has to do with the question of meaning. shannon explosively removed meaning from his concept of information knowing the meaning as relevant to the engineering problem when he talked about information he was talking about string of hits and the string of

symbols could translate into something sensible or something useful or could be sheer nonsense. welcome to our world. one thing we know is information is everywhere and we have all of it we could possibly want. maybe that's not literally true. maybe we are always hungry for more but we know there's lots of it. but in fact send data, those are cheap. paradoxically knowledge doesn't feel any more available or clear-cut or comfortably in our possession. there were in the world where there are millions of voices and

more than ever how to find the right ones to trust. tsl yet kind of prophetically said where is the wisdom we lost in knowledge, where is the knowledge we lost an information he said that in the 1930's. i do a little bit of a double take. lynnville is in that the question we are asking now? on the one hand we are envisioned in on the other hand we feel like we don't know anything. >> host: . some years ago you wrote a book called chaos and it was essentially about reviewing the order behind the seeming randomness. this book to me seems in a way to be about revealing the

randomness of the imperfection or the incompleteness behind what we think of as the tools that we use to define our reality. is that the way that you thought of that? >> guest: there are definitely connections there. this technical connections that i know that you are aware of between the science of chaos and information theory and i first heard of information theory when i was working on the chaos book from some of the scientists i was getting to know. they were using this thing called information theory created by this guy shannon to understand the behavior of the physical systems in particular one of them was analyzing the dynamics of a dripping faucet and he was doing it in terms of information theory.

isn't it formation something that is totally abstract? the connection is to do with randomness the interweaving of order and disorder. information it turns out is claude shannon's vision of information involved a way of measuring disorder in a physical system which is what the chaos scientists were trying to do, and in an exactly analogous parallel way measuring the disorder in the message in a telephone engineer will worry about the malaise and a message and also a redundancy and these are fighting each other. redundancy is a way of coping with milan's so the tools

converged in the aftermath when a new generation of mathematicians extended to them and this work is going on to this big and here's where i think i'm getting to when you're driving at. they come up again in a less technical way in the world we are living in where we, too are looking at a signal that involves a lot of plans new ways and as individuals trying to get past the randomness and find the parts of it that makes sense that our order leaned meaningful >> host: so does this book go all the way back to the work you did for chaos?

>> guest: this is the year before amazon of course sending away for claude shannon's little book the mathematical theory of communication which has never been out of print i don't think. it's a little university press book i had to get it by mail order but it was probable to get it and. some of it was technically and way over my yet. luckily it had a nice introduction by warren weaver then rockefeller university who had written shannon for scientific american. and shannon himself was riding in a way that is any of us can read to some extent if you're willing to skip the equations every so often he says something that makes a little bell go off

in your head and the bell that goes off says here's the modern world being born. this is really the kind of thinking that leads to the way every computer scientist thinks today and not just computer scientists but all of us who use these machines. the knowledge is filtered down to us and when we understand recorded music on your laptop or your ipad is in a way the same species of things as the words recorded in an ebook or a message that is being sent over twitter of these things are related to one another that's due to this book by shannon. so i carried it around for awhile and wrote these other books and finally i guess it

feels as though this is the book i was always trying to write. >> host: fascinating. so, the idea of the information age which is referred to the days that we live in, the idea that in our reality is defined by the information have networks and by an eerie forms of communication and in the same way that new ten gives rise to the clockwork universe or that 100 years or more after that you have the age of steam power kind of defiance the human perception

of reality. now we have this sense that information and networks apply that as a metaphor to the brain that that's what it's all about. do you think that is true or in like 20 years or so we will come up with some other perhaps entirely different metaphor for the world? >> guest: i actually think this is how the world is. i think the world really is made of information. it's kind of dangerous to say that and i'm not saying we have arrived at a theory of everything or that science can now relax. fantastic discoveries lie ahead and we only know that because fantastic discoveries have always lie ahead. scientists will revise the way

they look at the world, and discover a lot of the things we took for granted here in the year 2011 were kind of stupid. and we only know that because that's how it's always been. the only kind of prediction i'm willing to make about the future is the easy one where i say it's going to be like the past. but i do believe that information is what our world is made of