The Information - James Gleick [179]
♦ This word is not universally accepted, though the OED recognized it as of December 2007. David Mermin wrote that same year: “Unfortunately the preposterous spelling qubit currently holds sway.… Although “qubit” honors the English (German, Italian,…) rule that q should be followed by u, it ignores the equally powerful requirement that qu should be followed by a vowel. My guess is that “qubit” has gained acceptance because it visually resembles an obsolete English unit of distance, the homonymic cubit. To see its ungainliness with fresh eyes, it suffices to imagine … that one erased transparencies and cleaned ones ears with Qutips.”
14 | AFTER THE FLOOD
(A Great Album of Babel)
Suppose within every book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place.
—Hilary Mantel (2009)♦
“THE UNIVERSE (which others call the Library)…”♦
Thus Jorge Luis Borges began his 1941 story “The Library of Babel,” about the mythical library that contains all books, in all languages, books of apology and prophecy, the gospel and the commentary upon that gospel and the commentary upon the commentary upon the gospel, the minutely detailed history of the future, the interpolations of all books in all other books, the faithful catalogue of the library and the innumerable false catalogues. This library (which others call the universe) enshrines all the information. Yet no knowledge can be discovered there, precisely because all knowledge is there, shelved side by side with all falsehood. In the mirrored galleries, on the countless shelves, can be found everything and nothing. There can be no more perfect case of information glut.
We make our own storehouses. The persistence of information, the difficulty of forgetting, so characteristic of our time, accretes confusion. As the free, amateur, collaborative online encyclopedia called Wikipedia began to overtake all the world’s printed encyclopedias in volume and comprehensiveness, the editors realized that too many names had multiple identities. They worked out a disambiguation policy, which led to the creation of disambiguation pages—a hundred thousand and more. For example, a user foraging in Wikipedia’s labyrinthine galleries for “Babel” finds “Babel (disambiguation),” which leads in turn to the Hebrew name for ancient Babylon, to the Tower of Babel, to an Iraqi newspaper, a book by Patti Smith, a Soviet journalist, an Australian language teachers’ journal, a film, a record label, an island in Australia, two different mountains in Canada, and “a neutrally aligned planet in the fictional Star Trek universe.” And more. The paths of disambiguation fork again and again. For example, “Tower of Babel (disambiguation)” lists, besides the story in the Old Testament, songs, games, books, a Brueghel painting, an Escher woodcut, and “the tarot card.” We have made many towers of Babel.
Long before Wikipedia, Borges also wrote about the encyclopedia “fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopedia (New York, 1917),” a warren of fiction mingling with fact, another hall of mirrors and misprints, a compendium of pure and impure information that projects its own world. That world is called Tlön. “It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers.…”♦ writes Borges. “This plan is so vast that each writer’s contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos.” With good reason, the Argentine master has been taken up as a prophet (“our heresiarch uncle,”♦ William Gibson