The Information - James Gleick [111]
8 | THE INFORMATIONAL TURN
(The Basic Ingredient in Building a Mind)
It is probably dangerous to use this theory of information in fields for which it was not designed, but I think the danger will not keep people from using it.
—J. C. R. Licklider (1950)♦
MOST MATHEMATICAL THEORIES take shape slowly; Shannon’s information theory sprang forth like Athena, fully formed. Yet the little book of Shannon and Weaver drew scant public attention when it appeared in 1949. The first review came from a mathematician, Joseph L. Doob, who complained that it was more “suggestive” than mathematical—“and it is not always clear that the author’s mathematical intentions are honorable.”♦ A biology journal said, “At first glance, it might appear that this is primarily an engineering monograph with little or no application to human problems. Actually, the theory has some rather exciting implications.”♦ The Philosophical Review said it would be a mistake for philosophers to overlook this book: “Shannon develops a concept of information which, surprisingly enough, turns out to be an extension of the thermodynamic concept of entropy.”♦ The strangest review was barely a review at all: five paragraphs in Physics Today, September 1950, signed by Norbert Wiener, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Wiener began with a faintly patronizing anecdote:
Some fifteen years ago, a very bright young student came to the authorities at MIT with an idea for a theory of electric switching dependent on the algebra of logic. The student was Claude E. Shannon.
In the present book (Wiener continued), Shannon, along with Warren Weaver, “has summed up his views on communication engineering.”
The fundamental idea developed by Shannon, said Wiener, “is that of the amount of information as negative entropy.” He added that he himself—“the author of the present review”—had developed the same idea at about the same time.
Wiener declared the book to be work “whose origins were independent of my own work, but which has been bound from the beginning to my investigations by cross influences spreading in both directions.” He mentioned “those of us who have tried to pursue this analogy into the study of Maxwell’s demon” and added that much work remained to be done.
Then he suggested that the treatment of language was incomplete without greater emphasis on the human nervous system: “nervous reception and the transmission of language into the brain. I say these things not as a hostile criticism.”
Finally, Wiener concluded with a paragraph devoted to another new book: “my own Cybernetics.” Both books, he said, represent opening salvos in a field that promises to grow rapidly.
In my book, I have taken the privilege of an author to be more speculative, and to cover a wider range than Drs. Shannon and Weaver have chosen to do.… There is not only room, but a definite need for different books.
He saluted his colleagues for their well-worked and independent approach—to cybernetics.
Shannon, meanwhile, had already contributed a short review of Wiener’s book to the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, offering praise that could be described as faint. It is “an excellent introduction,” he said.♦ There was a little tension between these men. It could be felt weighing down the long footnote that anchored the opening page of Weaver’s portion of The Mathematical Theory of Communication:
Dr. Shannon has himself emphasized that communication theory owes a great debt to Professor Norbert Wiener for most of its basic philosophy. Professor Wiener, on the other hand, points out that much of Shannon’s early work on switching and mathematical logic antedated his own interest in this field; and generously adds that Shannon certainly deserves credit for independent development of such fundamental aspects of the theory as the introduction of entropic ideas.
Shannon’s colleague John Pierce wrote later: “Wiener’s head was full of his own work.… Competent people have told me that Wiener, under the misapprehension that he already