The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
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| Author | James Gleick |
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| Cover artist | Peter Mendelsund |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Popular science |
| Publisher | Pantheon Books (US), Fourth Estate (UK) |
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Publication date
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March 1, 2011 (US), March 31, 2011 (UK) |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 544 |
| ISBN | |
| LC Class | Z665 .G547 2011 |
| Preceded by | Isaac Newton |
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is a book by science history writer James Gleick published in March 2011 which covers the genesis of our current information age. It was on the New York Times best-seller list for three weeks following its debut.
The Information has also been published in ebook formats by Fourth Estate and Random House, and as an audiobook by Random House Audio.
Gleick begins with the tale of colonial European explorers and their fascination with African talking drums and their observed use to send complex and widely understood messages back and forth between villages far apart, and over even longer distances by relay. Gleick transitions from the information implications of such drum signaling to the impact of the arrival of long distance telegraph and then telephone communication to the commercial and social prospects of the industrial age west. Research to improve these technologies ultimately led to our understanding the essentially digital nature of information, quantized down to the unit of the bit (or qubit).
Starting with the development of symbolic written language (and the eventual perceived need for a dictionary), Gleick examines the history of intellectual insights central to information theory, detailing the key figures responsible such as Claude Shannon, Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and John Archibald Wheeler. The author also delves into how digital information is now being understood in relation to physics and genetics. Following the circulation of Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication and Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics many disciplines attempted to jump on the information theory bandwagon to varying success. Information theory concepts of data compression and error correction became especially important to the computer and electronics industries.
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