#NerdBooks: The Information - James Gleick
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Dusty Cooper
My grandfather was a computer engineer at General Electric. Growing up, we always had at least ten computers in the house. Drawers full of floppy discs. Several keyboards and other parts that you could swap out if the one you had wasn’t working. I had a computer before there was Windows, when you had to know the commands to run programs from DOS. We were the first people on the block to have the internet. My earliest internet memory is from when I was in 4th grade, which was the glorious year of 1993. I would have chat room parties with my friend Mandy, the only other person I knew who had the internet. We’d meet in some chat room and mess with everyone in there. Pretend we were fifty year old men and say ridiculous things. Whatever. We were 10 and thought it was hilarious.
Needless to say, this whole internet revolution has been a huge part of my life since I was a kid.
So imagine how excited my little nerd brain got when I read on Wired.com this morning about the new book by James Gleick, titled The Information.
Gleick basically thinks that our universe boils down to information, or bits of code. Makes sense, look at our DNA. Isn’t that just little bits of code, pieces of information that tell your cells what to do? These bits- and by extrapolation, information- are just a yes or no choice, also known as binary code. He goes on to explain that physicists are starting to look at the atom differently- that what makes it whatever type of particular atom are these bits of binary choice.
What a mind-blowing full circle theory. I haven’t been this excited to read a book since I got my hands on The Fabric of the Cosmos: Time, Space, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene.
I love this quote from the interview:
When people say that the Internet is going to make us all geniuses, that was said about the telegraph. On the other hand, when they say the Internet is going to make us stupid, that also was said about the telegraph. -James Gleick, Wired Magazine 3/1/2011
In other words, every technology has its place in our lives. I’d include Facebook and Twitter in that. They’re lovely. They make our lives different, more exciting. But someday, they’ll be dead just like the telegraph and we’ll be on to the next. Which I’m betting is some type of teleportation or holograph type thing, and there’s definitely a hoverboard involved.