The Information - James Gleick [180]
Long before Borges, the imagination of Charles Babbage had conjured another library of Babel. He found it in the very air: a record, scrambled yet permanent, of every human utterance.
What a strange chaos is this wide atmosphere we breathe!… The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man’s changeful will.♦
Edgar Allan Poe, following Babbage’s work eagerly, saw the point. “No thought can perish,”♦ he wrote in 1845, in a dialogue between two angels. “Did there not cross your mind some thought of the physical power of words? Is not every word an impulse on the air?” Further, every impulse vibrates outward indefinitely, “upward and onward in their influences upon all particles of all matter,” until it must, “in the end, impress every individual thing that exists within the universe.” Poe was also reading Newton’s champion Pierre-Simon Laplace. “A being of infinite understanding,” wrote Poe, “—one to whom the perfection of the algebraic analysis lay unfolded” could trace the undulations backward to their source.
Babbage and Poe took an information-theoretic view of the new physics. Laplace had expounded a perfect Newtonian mechanical determinism; he went further than Newton himself, arguing for a clockwork universe in which nothing is left to chance. Since the laws of physics apply equally to the heavenly bodies and the tiniest particles, and since they operate with perfect reliability, then surely (said Laplace) the state of the universe at every instant follows inexorably from the past and must lead just as relentlessly to the future. It was too soon to conceive of quantum uncertainty, chaos theory, or the limits of computability. To dramatize his perfect determinism, Laplace asked us to imagine a being—an “intelligence”—capable of perfect knowledge:
It would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.♦
Nothing else Laplace wrote ever became as famous as this thought experiment. It rendered useless not only God’s will but Man’s. To scientists this extreme Newtonianism seemed cause for optimism. To Babbage, all nature suddenly resembled a vast calculating engine, a grand version of his own deterministic machine: “In turning our views from these simple consequences of the juxtaposition of a few wheels, it is impossible not to perceive the parallel reasoning, as applied to the mighty and far more complex phenomena of nature.”♦ Each atom, once disturbed, must communicate its motion to others, and they in turn influence waves of air, and no impulse is ever entirely lost. The track of every canoe remains somewhere in the oceans. Babbage, whose railroad pen recorder traced on a roll of paper the history of a journey, saw information, formerly evanescent, as a series of physical impressions that were, or could be preserved. The phonograph, impressing sound into foil or wax, had yet to be invented, but Babbage could view the atmosphere as an engine of motion with meaning: “every atom impressed with good and with ill … which philosophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base.” Every word ever said, whether heard by a hundred listeners or none, far from having vanished into the air, leaves its indelible mark, the complete record of human utterance being encrypted by the laws of motion and capable, in theory, of being recovered—given enough computing power.
This was overoptimistic. Still, the same year Babbage published his essay, the artist and chemist Louis Daguerre in Paris perfected his means of capturing