I’m reading James Gleick’s The Information, and finding it exceptionally thought provoking. I’m almost done. The book is a vivid historical journey and exposition of various interconnected forms of communication as discovered and/or practiced by humans, including the syntax and logic of African drum communication that carries messages miles, the development of Morse code and the telegraph, the history of written word, Shannon’s “A Theory of Communication”, the history of computing machines beginning with Babbage and Ada Lovelace in England to tragic hero Turing and through to modern quantum computing. It also examines the information theory of biology, like the replication of DNA and discussion of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene that serves only to replicate itself, to build a protective body, find resources, etc.
Why is this sort of education not more emphasized? I remember learning about entropy in statistical mechanics, and maybe even from the time as young students when we started using telephones on our own, we could have been learning that the telephone is enabled by a deeply entrenched and complex infrastructure. Why was it never mentioned in English courses that Poe read work on cryptography and cryptanalysis as well as Laplace, whose philosophical thought, conversely, is not discussed or even mentioned in mathematics courses. We could easily enrich education at all levels by not erecting thick walls between disciplines, but instead letting each subject, English, maths, sciences, etc., have a multitude of horizons.
