The Information：A History, a Theory, a Flood

作者: James Gleick （詹姆斯·格雷克）著

出版社: Random House US

出版时间: 2011-03

版次: 1

ISBN: 9780375423727

定价: 261.60

装帧: 精装

开本: 16开

纸张: 胶版纸

页数: 544页

正文语种: 英语

分类: 外文古旧书>英文书>历史

5人买过

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.

The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.

And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading. James Gleick is our leading chronicler of science and modern technology. His first book, Chaos, a National Book Award finalist, has been translated into twenty-five languages. His best-selling biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton, were short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. Prologue 3
1 Drums That Talk 13
2 The Persistence of the Word 28
3 Two Wordbooks 51
4 To Throw the Powers of Thought into Wheel-Work 78
5 A Nervous System for the Earth 125
6 New Wires, New Logic 168
7 Information Theory 204
8 The Informational Turn 233
9 Entropy and Its Demons 269
10 Life's Own Code 287
11 Into the Meme Pool 310
12 The Sense of Randomness 324
13 Information Is Physical 355
14 After the Flood 373
15 New News Every Day 398
Epilogue 413
Acknowledgments 427
Notes 429
Bibliography 477
Index 505
内容简介:
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.

The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.

And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.
作者简介:
James Gleick is our leading chronicler of science and modern technology. His first book, Chaos, a National Book Award finalist, has been translated into twenty-five languages. His best-selling biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton, were short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize.
目录:
Prologue 3
1 Drums That Talk 13
2 The Persistence of the Word 28
3 Two Wordbooks 51
4 To Throw the Powers of Thought into Wheel-Work 78
5 A Nervous System for the Earth 125
6 New Wires, New Logic 168
7 Information Theory 204
8 The Informational Turn 233
9 Entropy and Its Demons 269
10 Life's Own Code 287
11 Into the Meme Pool 310
12 The Sense of Randomness 324
13 Information Is Physical 355
14 After the Flood 373
15 New News Every Day 398
Epilogue 413
Acknowledgments 427
Notes 429
Bibliography 477
Index 505