The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick
Pantheon, HK$400
Most of us think of information as facts that we can use - a weather report, a set of instructions on how to fix a car engine - but as James Gleick's masterful The Information makes clear, there are many more levels to it than that.
Information, for instance, is at the genesis of us all, in our genes. It's the thing that makes us what we are. Information doesn't even have to contain any meaning. The scientific discipline of information theory, which takes up a good chunk of this 500-page work, is founded on the idea that information is simply something that is transmitted from A to B through C.
One page of Shakespeare, 10 pages of random letters, or 100 units of anything - all are information when telegraphed, recited down a telephone or e-mailed. According to Gleick, information is everywhere, in everything. His book, in keeping with the current scientific thinking, puts information not only at the core of life, but at the centre of the entire cosmos.
Gleick is one of the few science writers who can write a book for the general reader which is scientific enough to interest science undergraduates - Hyperspace's Michio Kaku and The Elegant Universe's Brian Greene are others. Gleick's earlier Chaos succeeded in making chaos theory understandable to the layman.
In this book he undertakes the equally daunting tasks of defining what information is in all its myriad forms and then chronicling how it has been passed from human to human, and at a more fundamental level, from cell to organism, throughout history. As befits such a vast subject matter, his observations range far and wide: from talking drums and the invention of the alphabet, to the calculating machines of the steam age, the dawn of information theory in the mid-20th century, genetic coding, quantum physics, and, as a seeming afterthought, the internet.
