The Information (88 page)
♦
“TO DIE FOR AN IDEA”
: George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, “Clinical Notes,”
American Mercury
3, no. 9 (September 1924), 55.
♦
I WAS PROMISED ON A TIME TO HAVE REASON FOR MY RHYME
: Edmund Spenser, quoted by Thomas Fuller,
The History of the Worthies of England
(London: 1662).
♦
“I BELIEVE THAT, GIVEN THE RIGHT CONDITIONS”
: Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene
, 322.
♦
“WHEN YOU PLANT A FERTILE MEME”
: Quoted by Dawkins, Ibid., 192.
♦
“HARD AS THIS TERM MAY BE TO DELIMIT”
: W. D. Hamilton, “The Play by Nature,”
Science
196 (13 May 1977): 759.
♦
BIRDSONG
CULTURE
: Juan D. Delius, “Of Mind Memes and Brain Bugs, A Natural History of Culture,” in
The Nature of Culture
, ed. Walter A. Koch (Bochum, Germany: Bochum, 1989), 40.
♦
“FROM LOOK TO LOOK”
: James Thomson, “Autumn” (1730).
♦
“EVE, WHOSE EYE”
: John Milton,
Paradise Lost
, IX:1036.
♦
WALTON PROPOSED SIMPLE SELF-REPLICATING SENTENCES
: Douglas R. Hofstadter, “On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures,” 52.
♦
“I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU”
: Daniel C. Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, 346.
♦
“THE COMPUTERS IN WHICH MEMES LIVE”
: Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene
, 197.
♦
“IT WAS OBVIOUSLY PREDICTABLE”
: Ibid., 329.
♦
“MAKE SEVEN COPIES OF IT EXACTLY AS IT IS WRITTEN”
: Daniel W. VanArsdale, “Chain Letter Evolution,”
http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/chain-letter/evolution.html
(accessed 8 June 2010).
♦
“AN UNUSUAL CHAIN-LETTER REACHED QUINCY”
: Harry Middleton Hyatt,
Folk-Lore from Adams County, Illinois
, 2nd and rev. ed. (Hannibal, Mo.: Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation, 1965), 581.
♦
“THESE LETTERS HAVE PASSED FROM HOST TO HOST”
: Charles H. Bennett, Ming Li, and Bin Ma, “Chain Letters and Evolutionary Histories,”
Scientific American
288, no. 6 (June 2003): 77.
♦
FOR DENNETT, THE FIRST FOUR NOTES
: Daniel C. Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, 344.
♦
“MEMES HAVE NOT YET FOUND”
: Richard Dawkins, foreword to Susan Blackmore,
The Meme Machine
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xii.
♦
“THE HUMAN WORLD IS MADE OF STORIES”
: David Mitchell,
Ghostwritten
(New York: Random House, 1999), 378.
♦
“AS WITH ALL KNOWLEDGE, ONCE YOU KNEW IT”
: Margaret Atwood,
The Year of the Flood
(New York: Doubleday, 2009), 170.
♦
“A LIFE POURED INTO WORDS”
: John Updike, “The Author Observes His Birthday, 2005,”
Endpoint and Other Poems
(New York: Knopf, 2009), 8.
♦
“IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS INFORMATION”
: Fred I. Dretske,
Knowledge and the Flow of Information
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), xii.
♦
“I WONDER,” SHE SAID
: Michael Cunningham,
Specimen Days
(New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005), 154.
♦
FOUND A MAGICAL LITTLE BOOK
: Interviews, Gregory J. Chaitin, 27 October 2007 and 14 September 2009; Gregory J. Chaitin, “The Limits of Reason,”
Scientific American
294, no. 3 (March 2006): 74.
♦
“ASTOUNDING AND MELANCHOLY”
: Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman,
Gödel’s Proof
(New York: New York University Press, 1958), 6.
♦
“IT WAS A VERY SERIOUS CONCEPTUAL CRISIS”
: quoted in Gregory J. Chaitin,
Information, Randomness & Incompleteness: Papers on Algorithmic Information Theory
(Singapore: World Scientific, 1987), 61.
♦
HE WONDERED IF AT SOME LEVEL
: “Algorithmic Information Theory,” in Gregory J. Chaitin,
Conversations with a Mathematician
(London: Springer, 2002), 80.
♦
“PROBABILITY, LIKE TIME”
: John Archibald Wheeler,
At Home in the Universe, Masters of Modern Physics,
vol. 9 (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1994), 304.
♦
WHETHER THE POPULATION OF FRANCE
: Cf. John Maynard Keynes,
A Treatise on Probability
(London: Macmillan, 1921), 291.
♦
HE CHOSE THREE
:
KNOWLEDGE, CAUSALITY, AND DESIGN
: Ibid., 281.
♦
“CHANCE IS ONLY THE MEASURE”
: Henri Poincaré, “Chance,” in
Science and Method
, trans. Francis Maitland (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003), 65.
♦
1009732533765201358634673548
:
A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates
(Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955).
♦
AN ELECTRONIC ROULETTE WHEEL
: Ibid., ix–x.
♦
“STATE OF SIN”
: Von Neumann quoted in Peter Galison,
Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 703.
♦
“WHEN THE READING HEAD MOVES”
: “A Universal Turing Machine with Two Internal States,” in Claude Elwood Shannon,
Collected Papers,
ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), 733–41.
♦
“HE SUMMARIZES HIS OBSERVATIONS”
: Gregory J. Chaitin, “On the Length of Programs for Computing Finite Binary Sequences,”
Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery
13 (1966): 567.
♦
“WE ARE TO ADMIT NO MORE CAUSES”
: Isaac Newton, “Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy; Rule I,”
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
.
♦
IN THE WANING YEARS OF TSARIST RUSSIA
: Obituary,
Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society
22 (1990): 31; A. N. Shiryaev, “Kolmogorov: Life and Creative Activities,”
Annals of Probability
17, no. 3 (1989): 867.
♦
UNLIKELY TO ATTRACT INTERPRETATION
: David A. Mindell et al., “Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union,” in
Science and Ideology: A Comparative History
, ed. Mark Walker (London: Routledge, 2003), 66 and 81.
♦
HE SOON LEARNED TO HIS SORROW
: Cf. “Amount of Information and Entropy for Continuous Distributions,” note 1, in
Selected Works of A. N. Kolmogorov
, vol. 3,
Information Theory and the Theory of Algorithms
, trans. A. B. Sossinksky (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), 33.
♦
“MORE TECHNOLOGY THAN MATHEMATICS”
: A. N. Kolmogorov and A. N.Shiryaev,
Kolmogorov in Perspective
, trans. Harold H. McFaden, History of Mathematics vol. 20 (n.p.: American Mathematical Society, London Mathematical Society, 2000), 54.
♦
“WHEN I READ THE WORKS OF ACADEMICIAN KOLMOGOROV”
: Quoted in Slava Gerovitch,
From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 58.
♦
“CYBERNETICS IN WIENER’S UNDERSTANDING”
: “Intervention at the Session,” in
Selected Works of A. N. Kolmogorov
, 31.
♦
“AT EACH GIVEN MOMENT”
: Kolmogorov diary entry, 14 September 1943, in A. N. Kolmogorov and A. N. Shiryaev,
Kolmogorov in Perspective
, 50.
♦
“IS IT POSSIBLE TO INCLUDE THIS NOVEL”
: “Three Approaches to the Definition of the Concept ‘Quantity of Information,’ ” in
Selected Works of A. N. Kolmogorov
, 188.
♦
“OUR DEFINITION OF THE QUANTITY”
: A. N. Kolmogorov, “Combinatorial Foundations of Information Theory and the Calculus of Probabilities,”
Russian Mathematical Surveys
38, no. 4 (1983): 29–43.
♦
“THE INTUITIVE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ‘SIMPLE’ AND ‘COMPLICATED’ ”
: “Three Approaches to the Definition of the Concept ‘Quantity of Information,’ ”
Selected Works of A. N. Kolmogorov
, 221.
♦
“A NEW CONCEPTION OF THE NOTION ‘RANDOM’”
: “On the Logical Foundations of Information Theory and Probability Theory,”
Problems of Information Transmission
5, no. 3 (1969): 1–4.
♦
HE DREAMED OF SPENDING HIS LAST YEARS
: V. I. Arnold, “On A. N. Kolmogorov,” in A. N. Kolmogorov and A. N. Shiryaev,
Kolmogorov in Perspective
, 94.
♦
“THE PARADOX ORIGINALLY TALKS ABOUT ENGLISH”
: Gregory J. Chaitin,
Thinking About Gödel and Turing: Essays on Complexity, 1970–2007
(Singapore: World Scientific, 2007), 176.
♦
“IT DOESN’T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE WHICH PARADOX”
: Gregory J. Chaitin, “The Berry Paradox,”
Complexity
1, no. 1 (1995): 26; “Paradoxes of Randomness,”
Complexity
7, no. 5 (2002): 14–21.
♦
“ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY IS LIKE GOD”
: Interview, Gregory J. Chaitin, 14 September 2009.
♦
“GOD NOT ONLY PLAYS DICE”
: Foreword to Cristian S. Calude,
Information and Randomness: An Algorithmic Perspective
(Berlin: Springer, 2002), viii.
♦
“CHARMINGLY CAPTURED THE ESSENCE”
: Joseph Ford, “Directions in Classical Chaos,” in
Directions in Chaos
, ed. Hao Bai-lin (Singapore: World Scientific, 1987), 14.
♦
THE INFORMATION PACKING PROBLEM
: Ray J. Solomonoff, “The Discovery of Algorithmic Probability,”
Journal of Computer and System Sciences
55, no. 1 (1997): 73–88.
♦
“THREE MODELS FOR THE DESCRIPTION OF LANGUAGE”
: Noam Chomsky, “Three Models for the Description of Language,”
IRE Transactions on Information Theory
2, no. 3 (1956): 113–24.
♦
“THE LAWS OF SCIENCE THAT HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED”
: Ray J. Solomonoff, “A Formal Theory of Inductive Inference,”
Information and Control
7, no. 1 (1964): 1–22.
♦
“COCKTAIL SHAKER AND SHAKING VIGOROUSLY”
: Foreword to Cristian S. Calude,
Information and Randomness
, vii.
♦
“IT IS PREFERABLE TO CONSIDER COMMUNICATION”
: Gregory J. Chaitin, “Randomness and Mathematical Proof,” in
Information, Randomness & Incompleteness
, 4.
♦
“FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS OF INFORMATION THEORY”
: Charles H. Bennett, “Logical Depth and Physical Complexity,” in
The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey
, ed. Rolf Herken (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 209–10.
♦
“THE MORE ENERGY, THE FASTER THE BITS FLIP”
: Seth Lloyd,
Programming the Universe
(New York: Knopf, 2006), 44.
♦
“HOW DID THIS COME ABOUT?”
: Christopher A. Fuchs, “Quantum Mechanics as Quantum Information (and Only a Little More),”
arXiv:quant-ph/0205039v1
, 8 May 2002, 1.
♦
“THE REASON IS SIMPLE”
: Ibid., 4.
♦
“IT TEACHES US … THAT SPACE CAN BE CRUMPLED”
: John Archibald Wheeler with Kenneth Ford,
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics
(New York: Norton, 1998), 298.
♦
“OTHERWISE PUT … EVERY IT”
: “It from Bit” in John Archibald Wheeler,
At Home in the Universe
,
Masters of Modern Physics
, vol. 9 (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1994), 296.
♦
A PROBLEM AROSE WHEN STEPHEN HAWKING
: Stephen Hawking, “Black Hole Explosions?”
Nature
248 (1 March 1974), DOI:10.1038/248030a0, 30–31.
♦
PUBLISHING IT WITH A MILDER TITLE
: Stephen Hawking, “The Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse,”
Physical Review D
14 (1976): 2460–73; Gordon Belot et al., “The Hawking Information Loss Paradox: The Anatomy of a Controversy,”
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
50 (1999): 189–229.
♦
“INFORMATION LOSS IS HIGHLY INFECTIOUS”
: John Preskill, “Black Holes and Information: A Crisis in Quantum Physics,” Caltech Theory Seminar, 21 October 1994,
http://www.theory.caltech.edu/~preskill/talks/blackholes.pdf
(accessed 20 March 2010).
♦
“SOME PHYSICISTS FEEL THE QUESTION”
: John Preskill, “Black Holes and the Information Paradox,”
Scientific American
(April 1997): 54.