The Information, written by James Gleick, covers nearly
everything — jungle drums, language, Morse code, telegraphy,
telephony, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, genetics and more
— as it relates to information, which he describes as the
"fundamental core of things." Information theory can now be seen
as the overarching concept for our times, describing how
scientists in many disciplines see a common thread to their
work. Gleick's book spans centuries and geographic locations,
but one person stays throughout the story for almost 400 pages:
Claude Shannon, an engineer and mathematician who worked at Bell
Labs in the mid-20th century. Shannon created what is now called
information theory, Gleick tells Robert Siegel on All Things
Considered: "He was the first person to use the word 'bit' as a
scientific unit of measuring this funny abstract thing that
until this point in time scientists had not thought of as a
measurable scientific quantity." Bits are more commonly
recognized as the 1s and 0s that enable comput