The universe, the 18th-century mathematician and philosopher Jean Le Rond d’Alembert said, “would only be one fact and one great truth for whoever knew how to embrace* it from a single point of view.” James Gleick has such a perspective*, and signals it in the first word of the title of his new book, using the definite article we usually reserve for totalities like the universe, the ether* — and the Internet.

    Information, he says, is more than just the contents of our libraries and Web servers. It is “the blood and the fuel, the vital principle” of the world. Human consciousness, society, life on earth, the cosmos — it’s bits all the way down.

    Gleick makes his case in a sweeping survey that covers the five millenniums* of humanity’s engagement with information, from the invention of writing in Sumer* to the elevation of information to a first principle in the sciences over the last 50 years or so.

    As he puts it, “Human knowledge soaks into the network, into the cloud.” In an evocative* final paragraph, he pictures humanity wandering the corridors of Borges’ imaginary Library of Babel, which contains the texts of every possible book in every language, true and false, scanning the shelves in search of “lines of meaning among the leagues of cacophony* and incoherence*.”

    (SD-Agencies)