Unless you're a computer scientist, you've probably never heard of Claude Shannon, the Bell Labs researcher who In 1948 coined the term bit to refer to the smallest possible unit of information. Gleick rescues Shannon from obscurity in his enter taining, erudite, not-for-the-math-averse history The Information—and does lots more besides. Gleick presses rousing tales from the history of human communication (French semaphore telegraphs, African talking drums) into the service of one Very Big Idea-that in probing nature's deepest mysteries, inventors, scientists and philosophers have all been talking about the same thing: information.
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