The Information (85 page)

♦
“PERHAPS COMING UP WITH A THEORY”
: Jon Barwise, “Information and Circumstance,”
Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic
27, no. 3 (1986): 324.

♦
SAID NOTHING TO EACH OTHER ABOUT THEIR WORK
: Shannon interview with Robert Price: “A Conversation with Claude Shannon: One Man’s Approach to Problem Solving,”
IEEE Communications Magazine 22
(1984): 125; cf. Alan Turing to Claude Shannon, 3 June 1953, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

♦
“NO, I’M NOT INTERESTED IN DEVELOPING A
POWERFUL
BRAIN”
: Andrew Hodges,
Alan Turing: The Enigma
(London: Vintage, 1992), 251.

♦
“A CONFIRMED SOLITARY”
: Max H. A. Newman to Alonzo Church, 31 May 1936, quoted in Andrew Hodges,
Alan Turing
, 113.

♦
“THE JUSTIFICATION … LIES IN THE FACT”
: Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the
Entscheidungsproblem
,”
Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society
42 (1936): 230–65.

♦
“IT WAS ONLY BY TURING’S WORK”
: Kurt Gödel to Ernest Nagel, 1957, in
Kurt Gödel: Collected Works
, vol. 5, ed. Solomon Feferman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 147.

♦
“YOU SEE … THE FUNNY LITTLE ROUNDS”
: letter from Alan Turing to his mother and father, summer 1923, AMT/K/1/3, Turing Digital Archive,
http://www.turingarchive.org
.

♦
“IN ELEMENTARY ARITHMETIC THE TWO-DIMENSIONAL CHARACTER”
: Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers,” 230–65.

♦
“THE THING HINGES ON GETTING THIS HALTING INSPECTOR”
: “On the Seeming Paradox of Mechanizing Creativity,” in Douglas R. Hofstadter,
Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
(New York: Basic Books, 1985), 535.

♦
“IT USED TO BE SUPPOSED IN SCIENCE”
: “The Nature of Spirit,” unpublished essay, 1932, in Andrew Hodges,
Alan Turing
, 63.

♦
“ONE CAN PICTURE AN INDUSTRIOUS AND DILIGENT CLERK”
: Herbert B. Enderton, “Elements of Recursion Theory,” in Jon Barwise,
Handbook of Mathematical Logic
(Amsterdam: North Holland, 1977), 529.

♦
“A LOT OF PARTICULAR AND INTERESTING CODES”
: Alan Turing to Sara Turing, 14 October 1936, quoted in Andrew Hodges,
Alan Turing
, 120.

♦
“THE ENEMY KNOWS THE SYSTEM BEING USED”
: “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems” (1948), in Claude Elwood Shannon,
Collected Papers
, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), 90.

♦
“FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE CRYPTANALYST”
: Ibid., 113.

♦
“THE MERE SOUNDS OF SPEECH”
: Edward Sapir,
Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), 21.

♦
“
D
MEASURES, IN A SENSE, HOW MUCH A TEXT”
: “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems,” in Claude Shannon,
Collected Papers
, 85.

♦
“THE ENEMY IS NO BETTER OFF”
: Ibid., 97.

♦
“THE ‘MEANING’ OF A MESSAGE IS GENERALLY IRRELEVANT”
: “Communication Theory—Exposition of Fundamentals,”
IRE Transactions on Information Theory,
no. 1 (February 1950), in Claude Shannon,
Collected Papers
, 173.

♦
“WHAT GIBBS DID FOR PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY”
: Warren Weaver letter to Claude Shannon, 27 January 1949, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

♦
“SOMETHING OF A DELAYED ACTION BOMB”
: John R. Pierce, “The Early Days of Information Theory,”
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
19, no. 1 (1973): 4.

♦
“THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM OF COMMUNICATION”
: Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver,
The Mathematical Theory of Communication
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), 31.

♦
“THIS IS ALREADY DONE TO A LIMITED EXTENT”
: Ibid., 11.

♦
LANDMARK 1943 PAPER
: “Stochastic Problems in Physics and Astronomy,”
Reviews of Modern Physics
15, no. 1 (January 1943), 1.

♦
BOOK NEWLY PUBLISHED FOR SUCH PURPOSES
: M. G. Kendall and B. Babbington Smith,
Table of Random Sampling Numbers
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939). Kendall and Smith used a “randomizing machine”—a rotating disc with the ten digits illuminated at irregular intervals by a neon light. An earlier effort, by L. H. C. Tippett in 1927, drew 41,000 digits from population census reports, also noting only the last digit of any number. A slightly naïve article in the
Mathematical Gazette
argued in 1944 that machines were unnecessary: “In a modern community, there is, it seems, no need to construct a randomising machine, for so many features of sociological life exhibit randomness.… Thus a set of random numbers serviceable for all ordinary purposes can be constructed by reading the registration numbers of cars as they pass us in the street, for cars though numbered serially move about the streets in non-serial fashion, obvious errors, such as those of reading the numbers seen every morning on the way to the station along one’s own road when Mr. Smith’s car is always standing outside No. 49 being, of course, avoided.” Frank Sandon, “Random Sampling Numbers,”
The Mathematical Gazette
28 (December 1944): 216.

♦
TABLES CONSTRUCTED FOR USE BY CODE BREAKERS
: Fletcher Pratt,
Secret and Urgent: The Story of Codes and Ciphers
(Garden City, N.Y.: Blue Ribbon, 1939).

♦
“HOW MUCH ‘CHOICE’ IS INVOLVED”
: Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver,
The Mathematical Theory of Communication
, 18.

♦
“BINARY DIGITS, OR MORE BRIEFLY
,
BITS
”
: “A word suggested by J. W. Tukey,” he added. John Tukey, the statistician, had been a roommate of Richard Feynman’s at Princeton and spent some time working at Bell Labs after the war.

♦
“MORE ERRATIC AND UNCERTAIN”
: Claude Shannon, “Prediction and Entropy of Printed English,”
Bell System Technical Journal
30 (1951): 50, in Claude Shannon,
Collected Papers
, 94.

♦
“TO MAKE THE CHANCE OF ERROR”
: quoted in M. Mitchell Waldrop, “Reluctant Father of the Digital Age,”
Technology Review
(July–August 2001): 64–71.

♦
“IT’S A SOLID-STATE AMPLIFIER”
: Shannon interview with Anthony Liversidge,
Omni
(August 1987), in Claude Shannon,
Collected Papers
, xxiii.

♦
“BITS STORAGE CAPACITY”
: Handwritten note, 12 July 1949, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

♦
“IT IS PROBABLY DANGEROUS TO USE THIS THEORY”
: Heinz von Foerster, ed.,
Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems: Transactions of the Seventh Conference, March 23–24, 1950
(New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1951), 155.

♦
“AND IT IS NOT ALWAYS CLEAR”
: J. J. Doob, review (untitled),
Mathematical Reviews
10 (February 1949): 133.

♦
“AT FIRST GLANCE, IT MIGHT APPEAR”
: A. Chapanis, review (untitled),
Quarterly Review of Biology
26, no. 3 (September 1951): 321.

♦
“SHANNON DEVELOPS A CONCEPT OF
INFORMATION
”
: Arthur W. Burks, review (untitled),
Philosophical Review
60, no. 3 (July 1951): 398.

♦
SHORT REVIEW OF WIENER’S BOOK
:
Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers
37 (1949), in Claude Elwood Shannon,
Collected Papers
, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), 872.

♦
“WIENER’S HEAD WAS FULL”
: John R. Pierce, “The Early Days of Information Theory,”
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
19, no. 1 (1973): 5.

♦
THE WORD HE TOOK FROM THE GREEK
: André-Marie Ampère had used the word,
cybernétics
, in 1834 (
Essai sur la philosophie des sciences
).

♦
“A LAD WHO HAS BEEN PROUDLY TERMED”
: “Boy of 14 College Graduate,”
The New York Times
, 9 May 1909, 1.

♦
“AN INFANT PRODIGY NAMED WIENER”
: Bertrand Russell to Lucy Donnelly, 19 October 1913, quoted in Steve J. Heims,
John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), 18.

♦
“HE IS AN ICEBERG”
: Norbert Wiener to Leo Wiener, 15 October 1913, quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman,
Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Weiner, the Father of Cybernetics
(New York: Basic Books, 2005), 30.

♦
“WE ARE SWIMMING UPSTREAM AGAINST A GREAT TORRENT”
: Norbert Wiener,
I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964), 324.

♦
“A NEW INTERPRETATION OF MAN”
: Ibid., 375.

♦
“ANY CHANGE OF AN ENTITY”
: Arturo Rosenblueth et al., “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,”
Philosophy of Science
10 (1943): 18.

♦
“THAT IT WAS NOT SOME PARTICULAR PHYSICAL THING”
: Quoted in Warren S. McCulloch, “Recollections of the Many Sources of Cybernetics,”
ASC Forum
6, no. 2 (1974).

♦
“THEY ARE GROWING WITH FEARFUL SPEED”
: “In Man’s Image,”
Time
, 27 December 1948.

♦
“THE ALGEBRA OF LOGIC
PAR EXCELLENCE
”
: Norbert Wiener,
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961), 118.

♦
“TRAFFIC PROBLEMS AND OVERLOADING”
: Ibid., 132.

♦
“FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE”
: Warren S. McCulloch, “Through the Den of the Metaphysician,”
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
5, no. 17 (1954): 18.

♦
A NOAH’S ARK RULE
: Warren S. McCulloch, “Recollections of the Many Sources of Cybernetics,” 11.

♦
WIENER TOLD THEM THAT ALL THESE SCIENCES
: Steve J. Heims,
The Cybernetics Group
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 22.

♦
“THE SUBJECT AND THE GROUP”
: Heinz von Foerster, ed.,
Transactions of the Seventh Conference
, 11.

♦
“TO SAY, AS THE PUBLIC PRESS SAYS”
: Ibid., 12.

♦
“I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO PREVENT THESE REPORTS”
: Ibid., 18.

♦
IT WAS, AT BOTTOM, A PERFECTLY ORDINARY SITUATION
: Jean-Pierre Dupuy,
The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science
, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 89.

♦
COULD PROPERLY BE DESCRIBED AS ANALOG OR DIGITAL
: Heinz von Foerster, ed.,
Transactions of the Seventh Conference
, 13.

♦
“THE STATE OF THE NERVE CELL WITH NO MESSAGE IN IT”
: Ibid., 20.

♦
“IN THIS WORLD IT SEEMS BEST”
: Warren S. McCulloch and John Pfeiffer, “Of Digital Computers Called Brains,”
Scientific Monthly
69, no. 6 (1949): 368.

♦
HE WAS WORKING ON AN IDEA FOR QUANTIZING SPEECH
: J. C. R. Licklider, interview by William Aspray and Arthur Norberg, 28 October 1988, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota,
http://special.lib.umn.edu/cbi/oh/pdf.phtml?id=180
(accessed 6 June 2010).

♦
“MATHEMATICIANS ARE ALWAYS DOING THAT”
: Heinz von Foerster, ed.,
Transactions of the Seventh Conference
, 66.

♦
“YES!” INTERRUPTED WIENER
: Ibid., 92.

♦
“IF YOU TALK ABOUT ANOTHER KIND OF INFORMATION”
: Ibid., 100.

♦
“IT MIGHT, FOR EXAMPLE, BE A RANDOM SEQUENCE”
: Ibid., 123.

♦
“I WOULDN’T CALL THAT RANDOM, WOULD YOU? ”
: Ibid., 135.

♦
“I WANTED TO CALL THE WHOLE”
: quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman,
Dark Hero of the Information Age
, 189.

♦
“I’M THINKING OF THE OLD MAYA TEXTS”
: Heinz von Foerster, ed.,
Transactions of the Seventh Conference
, 143.