Prologue

1. The bit now joined the hinge the pound the quiet and the minute as a determinant quantity fundamental unit of measure.
2. Everyone understood that electricity served as a surrogate for sound, the sound of the human voice, waves in the air entering the telephone mouthpiece and converted into electrical waveforms
3. See a chain of abstraction and conversion: the dots and dashes representing letters of the alphabet, the letters representing sound and in combination forming words, the words representing some ultimate substrate of meaning perhaps best left to philosophers
4. Most communication engineers focused their expertise on physical problems, amplification and modulation, phase distortion, and signal to noise degradation. Shannon liked games and puzzles. Secret codes entranced him, beginning when he was a boy reading Edgar Allan Poe. He gathered threads like a magpie.
5. Hermann Wyl, who taught him what a theory was. 'Theories permit consciousness to jump over its own shadow, to leave behind the given, to represent the transcendent, yet as is self-evident, only in symbols.'
6. Until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague - force, mass, motion, and even time - and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities suitable for use in mathematical formulas
7. Shannon's theory made a bridge between information and uncertainty, between information and entropy, and between information and chaos.
8. Life spreads through networking, and the body itself is an information processor
9. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level. It serves as an alphabet and a code, with 6 billion units coming together to form a human being.
10. The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly intertwined communication network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organisms and their environment.
11. "The information circle becomes the unit of life," states Weber Loewenstein after thirty years spent studying intercellular communication.
12. The gene has its cultural analog too: the meme. In cultural evolution, a meme is a replicator and propagator - an idea, a fashion, a chain letter, or a conspiracy theory. In a way, a meme is a virus, spreading from one individual to another.
13. Theorists focused their efforts and resources on the search for fundamental particles and the laws governing their interactions.

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