These subjects together form an informal "first half" of the book, and succeed in prompting readers to think through the genesis of information as something (first) represented and (eventually) manipulated in tangible forms like scripts, tones, and gears. Disclaimer: I took chaos mathematics at school so I was reasonably familiar with most presented concepts, which could have made it a little more boring. James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era's defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

Confronted with a nonlinear system, scientists would have to substitute linear approximations or find some other uncertain backdoor approach.Or, it is analogous to saying that the information content of enigma-encrypted Wehrmacht transmissions was retrieved not by the codebreakers at Bletchly Park but by the radio operators who determined what radio frequency the messages were broadcast on. Gleick seems aware of this special relationship that defines information (per Shannon), but never pursues it and eventually abandons it.

From Meteorology, to Physics, then Mathematics, Astronomy, hydrodynamics, and finally Biology by the 80s. Newton was okay for some things but all these new equations describe just HOW little uncertainties can create huge chaotic messes. It portrays the efforts of dozens of scientists whose separate work contributed to the developing field.That is an interesting concept, but it actually has little to do with "information" as treated in the rest of the book: alphabets, calculators, cyphers, telegraphs, genes, Wikipedia articles.

The book covers chaos theory under the lens of four themes: sensitive dependence on initial conditions, self-similarity, universality, and nonlinearity. Like other scientists at the time, he believed that small fluctuations didn’t have big effects on large-scale systems like the weather. The author mentions these concepts but without going into lucid examples of what chaos theory implies for them.

And given this combination of the book's ambition and approach, from The Information emerge some weaknesses. This is a group for people who enjoy books that transport them to a different time and place through time travel. One of the compelling features of the chaos story is that this scientific breakthrough wasn't a physics, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, or biology breakthrough; it was all of them. His next books included two biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, and Isaac Newton, which John Banville said would "surely stand as the definitive study for a very long time to come. It was sprawling, and attempts at unification (aside from leading Gleick to embrace absurdities and forget what information even is) fell flat.

He gives an engrossing treatment of talking drums, and he gives an equally engrossing treatment of Charles Babbage and Ada Byron. While some may say this makes it a less informative book, for me this made it one of the most intriguing non-fiction books I have read.So, thanks to James Gleick for that too- late realization and doing what the uninspired mathbots should have done years ago. Most of science as we know it, as it was made in the first place, and as we learned about it in school is linear. James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology.