The Information - James Gleick [181]
By painting or drawing, an artist—with skill, training, and long labor—reconstructs what the eye might see. By contrast, a daguerreotype is in some sense the thing itself—the information, stored, in an instant. It was unimaginable, but there it was. The possibilities made the mind reel. Once storage began, where would it stop? An American essayist immediately connected photography to Babbage’s atmospheric library of sounds: Babbage said that every word was registered somewhere in the air, so perhaps every image, too, left its permanent mark—somewhere.
In fact, there is a great album of Babel. But what too, if the great business of the sun be to act registrar likewise, and to give out impressions of our looks, and pictures of our actions; and so … for all we know to the contrary, other worlds may be peopled and conducted with the images of persons and transactions thrown off from this and from each other; the whole universal nature being nothing more than phonetic and photogenic structures.♦
The universe, which others called a library or an album, then came to resemble a computer. Alan Turing may have noticed this first: observing that the computer, like the universe, is best seen as a collection of states, and the state of the machine at any instant leads to the state at the next instant, and thus all the future of the machine should be predictable from its initial state and its input signals.
The universe is computing its own destiny.
Turing noticed that Laplace’s dream of perfection might be possible in a machine but not in the universe, because of a phenomenon which, a generation later, would be discovered by chaos theorists and named the butterfly effect. Turing described it this way in 1950:
The system of the “universe as a whole” is such that quite small errors in initial conditions can have an overwhelming effect at a later time. The displacement of a single electron by a billionth of a centimetre at one moment might make the difference between a man being killed by an avalanche a year later, or escaping.♦
If the universe is a computer, we may still struggle to access its memory. If it is a library, it is a library without shelves. When all the world’s sounds disperse through the atmosphere, no word is left attached to any particular bunch of atoms. The words are anywhere and everywhere. That was why Babbage called this information store a “chaos.” Once again he was ahead of his time.
When the ancients listed the Seven Wonders of the World, they included the Lighthouse of Alexandria, a 400-foot stone tower built to aid sailors, but overlooked the library nearby. The library, amassing hundreds of thousands of papyrus rolls, maintained the greatest collection of knowledge on earth, then and for centuries to come. Beginning in the third century BCE, it served the Ptolemies’ ambition to buy, steal, or copy all the writings of the known world. The library enabled Alexandria to surpass Athens as an intellectual center. Its racks and cloisters held the dramas of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides; the mathematics of Euclid, Archimedes, and Eratosthenes; poetry, medical texts, star charts, mystic writings—“such a blaze of knowledge and discovery,” H. G. Wells declared, “as the world was not to see again until the sixteenth century.… It is the true beginning of Modern History.”♦ The lighthouse loomed large, but the library was the real wonder. And then it burned.
Exactly when and how that happened, no one can ever know. Probably more than once. Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy’s souls reside there, too. “The Romans burnt the books of the