The Information (89 page)
♦
“I THINK THE INFORMATION PROBABLY GOES OFF”
: Quoted in Tom Siegfried,
The Bit and the Pendulum: From Quantum Computing to M Theory—The New Physics of Information
(New York: Wiley and Sons, 2000), 203.
♦
“THERE IS NO BABY UNIVERSE”
: Stephen Hawking, “Information Loss in Black Holes,”
Physical Review D
72 (2005): 4.
♦
THE “THERMODYNAMICS OF COMPUTATION”
: Charles H. Bennett, “Notes on the History of Reversible Computation,”
IBM Journal of Research and Development
44 (2000): 270.
♦
“COMPUTERS … MAY BE THOUGHT OF AS ENGINES”
: Charles H. Bennett, “The Thermodynamics of Computation—a Review,”
International Journal of Theoretical Physics
21, no. 12 (1982): 906.
♦
BACK-OF-THE-ENVELOPE CALCULATION
: Ibid.
♦
ROLF LANDAUER
: “Information Is Physical,”
Physics Today
23 (May 1991); “Information Is Inevitably Physical,” in Anthony H. G. Hey, ed.,
Feynman and Computation
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002), 77.
♦
STRAIGHT AND NARROW OLD IBM TYPE
: Charles Bennett, quoted by George Johnson in “Rolf Landauer, Pioneer in Computer Theory, Dies at 72,”
The New York Times
, 30 April 1999.
♦
“YOU MIGHT SAY THIS IS THE REVENGE”
: Interview, Charles Bennett, 27 October 2009.
♦
BENNETT AND HIS RESEARCH ASSISTANT
: J. A. Smolin, “The Early Days of Experimental Quantum Cryptography,”
IBM Journal of Research and Development
48 (2004): 47–52.
♦
“WE SAY THINGS SUCH AS ‘ALICE SENDS BOB’ ”
: Barbara M. Terhal, “Is Entanglement Monogamous?”
IBM Journal of Research and Development
48, no. 1 (2004): 71–78.
♦
FOLLOWING AN INTRICATE AND COMPLEX PROTOCOL
: A detailed explanation can be found in Simon Singh,
The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Codebreaking
(London: Fourth Estate, 1999); it takes ten pages of exquisite prose, beginning at 339.
♦
“STAND BY
:
I’LL TELEPORT YOU SOME GOULASH”
: IBM advertisement,
Scientific American
(February 1996), 0–1; Anthony H. G. Hey, ed.,
Feynman and Computation
, xiii; Tom Siegfried,
The Bit and the Pendulum
, 13.
♦
“UNFORTUNATELY THE PREPOSTEROUS SPELLING
QUBIT
”
: N. David Mermin,
Quantum Computer Science: An Introduction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4.
♦
“CAN QUANTUM-MECHANICAL DESCRIPTION OF PHYSICAL REALITY”
:
Physical Review
47 (1935): 777–80.
♦
“EINSTEIN HAS ONCE AGAIN EXPRESSED HIMSELF”
: Wolfgang Pauli to Werner Heisenberg, 15 June 1935, quoted in Louisa Gilder,
The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn
(New York: Knopf, 2008), 162.
♦
“THAT WHICH REALLY EXISTS IN B”
: Albert Einstein to Max Born, March 1948, in
The Born-Einstein Letters
, trans. Irene Born (New York: Walker, 1971), 164.
♦
IT TOOK MANY MORE YEARS BEFORE THE LATTER
: Asher Peres, “Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen, and Shannon,”
arXiv:quant-ph/0310010 v1
, 2003.
♦
“TERMINOLOGY CAN SAY IT ALL”
: Christopher A. Fuchs, “Quantum Mechanics as Quantum Information (and Only a Little More”:
arXiv: quant-ph/1003.5209 v1
, 26 March 2010: 3.
♦
BENNETT PUT ENTANGLEMENT TO WORK
: Charles H. Bennett et al., “Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State Via Dual Classical and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Channels,”
Physical Review Letters
70 (1993): 1895.
♦
“SECRET! SECRET! CLOSE THE DOORS”
: Richard Feynman, “Simulating Physics with Computers,” in Anthony H. G. Hey, ed.,
Feynman and Computation
, 136.
♦
“FEYNMAN’S INSIGHT”
: Interview, Charles H. Bennett, 27 October 2009.
♦
“A PRETTY MISERABLE SPECIMEN”
: N. David Mermin,
Quantum Computer Science
, 17.
♦
RSA ENCRYPTION
: named after its inventors, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman.
♦
THEY ESTIMATED THAT THE COMPUTATION
: T. Kleinjung, K. Aoki, J. Franke, et al., “Factorization of a 768-bit RSA modulus,” Eprint archive no. 2010/006, 2010.
♦
“QUANTUM COMPUTERS WERE BASICALLY A REVOLUTION”
: Dorit Aharonov, panel discussion “Harnessing Quantum Physics,”18 October 2009, Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Ontario; and e-mail message 10 February 2010.
♦
“MANY PEOPLE CAN READ A BOOK”
: Charles H. Bennett, “Publicity, Privacy, and Permanence of Information,” in
Quantum Computing: Back Action
, AIP Conference Proceeding 864 (2006), ed. Debabrata Goswami (Melville, N.Y.: American Institute of Physics), 175–79.
♦
“IF SHANNON WERE AROUND NOW”
: Charles H. Bennett, interview, 27 October 2009.
♦
“TO WORK OUT ALL THE POSSIBLE MIRRORED ROOMS”
: Shannon interview with Anthony Liversidge,
Omni
(August 1987), in Claude Elwood Shannon,
Collected Papers
, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), xxxii.
♦
A MODEST TO-DO LIST
: John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,”
Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics
(1989), 368.
♦
“SUPPOSE WITHIN EVERY BOOK”
: Hilary Mantel,
Wolf Hall
(New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 394.
♦
“THE UNIVERSE (WHICH OTHERS CALL THE LIBRARY)”
: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” in
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
(New York: New Directions, 1962), 54.
♦
“IT IS CONJECTURED THAT THIS BRAVE NEW WORLD”
: Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in
Labyrinths
, 8.
♦
“OUR HERESIARCH UNCLE”
: William Gibson, “An Invitation,” introduction to
Labyrinths
, xii.
♦
“WHAT A STRANGE CHAOS”
: Charles Babbage,
The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment
, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1838), 111.
♦
“NO THOUGHT CAN PERISH”
: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Power of Words” (1845), in
Poetry and Tales
(New York: Library of America, 1984), 823–24.
♦
“IT WOULD EMBRACE IN THE SAME FORMULA”
: Pierre-Simon Laplace,
A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
, trans. Frederick Wilson Truscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory (New York: Dover, 1951).
♦
“IN TURNING OUR VIEWS”
: Charles Babbage,
The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise
, 44.
♦
“THE ART OF PHOTOGENIC DRAWING”
: Nathaniel Parker Willis, “The Pencil of Nature: A New Discovery,”
The Corsair
1, no. 5 (April 1839): 72.
♦
“IN FACT, THERE IS A GREAT ALBUM OF BABEL”
: Ibid., 71.
♦
“THE SYSTEM OF THE ‘UNIVERSE AS A WHOLE’ ”
: Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,”
Minds and Machines
59, no. 236 (1950): 440.
♦
“SUCH A BLAZE OF KNOWLEDGE AND DISCOVERY”
: H. G. Wells,
A Short History of the World
(San Diego: Book Tree, 2000), 97.
♦
“THE ROMANS BURNT THE BOOKS OF THE JEWS”
: Isaac Disraeli,
Curiosities of Literature
(London: Routledge & Sons, 1893), 17.
♦
“ALL THE LOST PLAYS OF THE ATHENIANS!”
: Tom Stoppard,
Arcadia
(London: Samuel French, 1993), 38.
♦
“IF YOU WANT TO WRITE ABOUT FOLKLORE”
: “Wikipedia: Requested Articles,”
http://web.archive.org/web/20010406104800/www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Requested_articles
(accessed 4 April 2001).
♦
“AGING IS WHAT YOU GET”
: Quoted by Nicholson Baker in “The Charms of Wikipedia,”
New York Review of Books
55, no. 4 (20 March 2008). The same anonymous user later struck again, vandalizing the entries on angioplasty and Sigmund Freud.
♦
“IT HAS NEVER BEEN SPREAD OUT, YET”
: Lewis Carroll,
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
(London: Macmillan, 1893), 169.
♦
“THIS IS AN OBJECT IN SPACE, AND I’VE SEEN IT”
: Interview, Jimmy Wales, 24 July 2008.
♦
“
DIE SCHRAUBE AN DER HINTEREN LINKEN BREMSBACKE
”
:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Die_Schraube_an_der_hinteren_linken_Bremsbacke_am_Fahrrad_von_Ulrich_Fuchs
(accessed 25 July 2008).
♦
“A PLAN ENTIRELY NEW”
:
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, 3rd edition, title page; cf. Richard Yeo,
Encyclopædic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 181.
♦
“MANY TOPICS ARE BASED ON THE RELATIONSHIP”
: “Wikipedia: What Wikipedia Is Not,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not
(accessed 3 August 2008).
♦
“HE READ FOR METAPHYSICS”
: Charles Dickens,
The Pickwick Papers
, chapter 51.
♦
“I BEGAN STANDING WITH MY COMPUTER OPEN”
: Nicholson Baker, “The Charms of Wikipedia.”
♦
“A HAMADRYAD IS A WOOD-NYMPH”
: John Banville,
The Infinities
(London: Picador, 2009), 178.
♦
“MADE UP OF SYLLABLES THAT APPEAR”
: Deming Seymour, “A New Yorker at Large,”
Sarasota Herald
, 25 August 1929.
♦
BY 1934 THE BUREAU WAS MANAGING A LIST
: “Regbureau,”
The New Yorker
(26 May 1934), 16.
♦
AS THE HISTORIAN BRIAN OGILVIE HAS SHOWN
: Brian W. Ogilvie,
The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
♦
SCANDIX, PECTEN VENERIS, HERBA SCANARIA
: Ibid., 173.
♦
CATALOGUE OF 6,000 PLANTS
: Caspar Bauhin; Ibid., 208.
♦
“THE NAME OF A MAN IS LIKE HIS SHADOW”
: Ernst Pulgram,
Theory of Names
(Berkeley, Calif.: American Name Society, 1954), 3.
♦
“A SCIENTIST’S IDEA OF A SHORT WAY”
: Michael Amrine, “ ‘Megabucks’ for What’s ‘Hot,’ ”
The New York Times Magazine
, 22 April 1951.
♦
“IT’S AS IF YOU KNEEL TO PLANT THE SEED”
: Jaron Lanier,
You Are Not a Gadget
(New York: Knopf, 2010), 8.
♦
SERVER FARMS PROLIFERATE
: Cf. Tom Vanderbilt, “Data Center Overload,”
The New York Times Magazine
, 14 June 2009.
♦
LLOYD CALCULATES
: Seth Lloyd, “Computational Capacity of the Universe,”
Physical Review Letters
88, no. 23 (2002).
♦
“SORRY FOR ALL THE UPS AND DOWNS”
:
http://www.andrewtobias.com/bkoldcolumns/070118.html
(accessed 18 January 2007).
♦
“GREAT MUTATION”
: Carl Bridenbaugh, “The Great Mutation,”
American Historical Review
68, no. 2 (1963): 315–31.
♦
“NOTWITHSTANDING THE INCESSANT CHATTER”
: Ibid., 322.
♦
A THOUSAND PEOPLE IN THE BALLROOM
: “Historical News,”
American Historical Review
63, no. 3 (April 1963): 880.
♦
TENDED TO SLOT THE PRINTING PRESS
: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein,
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 25.
♦
“DATA COLLECTION, STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS”
: Ibid., xvi.
♦
“A DECISIVE POINT OF NO RETURN”
: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, “Clio and Chronos: An Essay on the Making and Breaking of History-Book Time,”
History and Theory
6, suppl. 6: History and the Concept of Time (1966), 64.
♦
“ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORICAL CHANGE”
: Ibid., 42.
♦
“SCRIBAL CULTURE”
: Ibid., 61.
♦
PRINT WAS TRUSTWORTHY, RELIABLE, AND PERMANENT
: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein,
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
, 624 ff.
