Free Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone Page B

the theory’s practical merit. Just use more bandwidth, more power, Pierce suggested. Laying cable was cheap compared to the computing power needed to use digital encoding.
    Sputnik and the U.S. space program changed that mind-set. It cost millions to put a battery in space. Satellite communications had to make the best of anemic power and bandwidth. Once developed for NASA, digital codes and integrated circuits became cheap enough for consumer applications.
    We would be living in a very different world today without Shannon’s work. All of our digital gear is subject to the noise of current surges, static, and cosmic rays. Every time a computer starts up, it reads megabytes of information from disk. Were even a few bits garbled, programs would be corrupted and would likely crash. Shannon’s theory showed that there is a way to make the chance of misread data negligible. The ambivalent blessing of Internet file sharing also derives from Shannon. Were it not for Shannon-inspired error-correcting codes, music and movie files would degrade every time they were transmitted over the Internet or stored on a hard disk. As one journalist put it recently, “No Shannon, no Napster.”
     
     
    By the 1950s, the general press started to pick up on the importance of Shannon’s work. Fortune magazine declared information theory to be one of humanity’s “proudest and rarest creations, a great scientific theory which could profoundly and rapidly alter man’s view of the world.”
    The very name “information theory” sounded expansive and open-ended. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was often used to embrace computer science, artificial intelligence, and robotics (fields that fascinated Shannon but which he considered distinct from information theory). Thinkers intuited a cultural revolution with computers, networks, and mass media at its base.
    “The word communication will be used here in a very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another,” begins the introduction to a 1949 book, The Mathematical Theory of Communication , reprinting Shannon’s paper. “This, of course, involves not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theater, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior.” These words were written by Shannon’s former employer Warren Weaver. Weaver’s essay presented information theory as a humanistic discipline—perhaps misleadingly so.
    Strongly influenced by Shannon, media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term “information age” in Understanding Media (1964). Oracular as some of his pronouncements were, McLuhan spoke loud and clear with that concise coinage. It captured the way the electronic media (still analog in the 1960s) were changing the world. It implied, more presciently than McLuhan could have known, that Claude Shannon was a prime mover in that revolution.
    There were earnest attempts to apply information theory to semantics, linguistics, psychology, economics, management, quantum physics, literary criticism, garden design, music, the visual arts, and even religion. (In 1949 Shannon was drawn into a correspondence with science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, apparently by way of John Pierce. Hubbard had just devised “Dianetics,” and Shannon referred him to Warren McCulloch, a scientist working on neural networks. To this day Hubbard’s Scientology faith cites Shannon and information theoretic jargon in its literature and web sites. Hubbard was known for repeating George Orwell’s dictum that the way to get rich is to start a religion.)
    Shannon himself dabbled with an information-theoretic analysis of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake . Betty Shannon created some of the first “computer-generated” music with Pierce. Bell Labs was an interdisciplinary place. Several of its scientists, notably Billy Kluver, collaborated with the New York avant-garde: John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, David Tudor, and others,